


i understand (i'm a liability)

by floweryfran



Category: Iron Man (Comics), Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, BAMF Peter Parker, Depression, Eating Disorders, Fluff and Angst, Harley Keener & Peter Parker Friendship, Harley Keener Needs a Hug, Harley Keener is Tony Stark's Adopted Child, Harley Keener is a Good Bro, Harley Keener-centric, Hurt Harley Keener, Hurt Peter Parker, Irondad, Marvel Universe, Parent Tony Stark, Precious Peter Parker, Protective Peter Parker, Protective Tony Stark, Suicidal Thoughts, Tony Stark Acting as Harley Keener's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Whump, domestic abuse, irondad and spider-son
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22870723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: “I… am not being challenged in the right ways here,” Harley says slowly, carefully. He’s not really lying, this way. He is being fucking challenged, alright, but not by school. Not by the things that should challenge him.“Then move here,” Tony says, and Harley’s heart drops straight into his feet.
Relationships: Harley Keener & Harley Keener's Father, Harley Keener & Harley Keener's Mother, Harley Keener & Harley Keener's Sister, Harley Keener & James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Harley Keener & Peter Parker, Harley Keener & Tony Stark
Comments: 165
Kudos: 681
Collections: Peter Parker Stories





	i understand (i'm a liability)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheOceanIsMyInkwell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/gifts).



> for kaleb, who is a wonderful human, writer, and friend. i have a lot of love for him. his writing is some of the first stuff that got me into irondad and it continues to floor me every time. <333
> 
> PLEASE check endnotes or the tags above for warnings before reading. no actions are described in detail, but some possibly triggering topics are discussed.
> 
> if the mcu doesnt need a consistent timeline then neither do i. harley is in peter’s year at school but born the october before peter. ignore my plathian levels of confessionalism & dumping of personal traumas onto a character to work through them 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xrTzQi4davqReA6Ul86pJ?si=Ld0onWHiT1yMAFKeb6avxg <\-- that's a playlist i put together for this behemoth piece <3

Harley Keener was always a strange boy. When he was young he ran around clumsy in ladybug-print galoshes that were far too big around his ankles. He wore t-shirts too long for his torso, shorts too short for his legs. His hair hung into his eyes and he played in the mud, watched bugs skittering, soaked the sunshine into his skin and imagined it smelled like summer peaches roasting, still clinging to the tree. He charted stars and built puzzles and fiddled under the hood of his pa’s car when no one was around to reprimand him for it. He took books on evolution and philosophy from the library. Wrote his first short story at age five. Read the dictionary for fun. 

Freckled like a strawberry across his nose, under his eyebrows. Had lips too thin, a nose too small. He was waifish, and wild, and asked questions of his teachers that they never wanted to answer.  _ But why are we crossing out the thing that’s different— can’t I put a heart around it? Shouldn’t we have funerals for dying stars? When did America decide it was right about everything? Where do forgotten memories go? I think a hotel on the moon would be a good business venture.  _

He was a child of stripes; a child of muddy roller skates; a Fleetwood Mac child that would close his eyes and spin himself dizzy just to feel the grass under his skin when he fell. He was guitar strings and the calluses they carved. He was too-long shoelaces looped around the ankles. He was metal lunch boxes clanging against the cinderblock walls of the winding school hallways because he swung his arms too far when he walked. 

He would hold a frog to feel it expand. He would tear a branch off a tree to plant it, to whisper to Mother Nature,  _ please, please, please make another tree, we’re running out of clean air, we need it.  _ He would nurse a bird with a broken wing back to health. He would stop in the road to pet a rabid dog, to calm it down, to lure it towards Mister Meyer down the street, who had a barn and was possibly Doctor Doolittle in disguise. He would fix toasters and motorbike engines and backed-up drains all while fingerpainting a wildflower field to gift to his momma and mixing up pancake batter for breakfast— a do-gooding renaissance man even before his balls dropped. 

Harley believed there was magic in everything, and he was damn intent on keeping it alive. 

He was an especially strange boy. 

—

The first time Harley doesn’t eat for a full day, it isn’t by choice.

He’s very nearly five, and his pa towers above him, even bent at the waist, looking down the bridge of his nose at Harley. “You can stop to eat,” his pa says in his gravelly voice, “once you’ve finished all your chores.”

“Which chores?” Harley asks, only the  _ ch _ of  _ chores  _ rolls off his toddler tongue more like a  _ sh, _ clumsy and uncouth. He rubs his knuckles under his nose. He was outside kicking around in the pond when his pa came and wrenched him inside, leaving a ring of blue around his elbow. Now he’s coated in goosebumps from the chill that lingers between the walls of the house. Harley thinks it might very well be haunted, the way he can find a wind in still air. The floorboards murmur. The windows snicker. The doors hum. 

“Collect all the laundry and put the loads in,” says Harley’s pa. “Start preparing some sorta food for dinner for us all. Your ma is too pregnant to do that,” he pauses, “or, that’s what she says, anyhow. Then you gotta sweep the upstairs and down, dust every room, and water the garden.” Harley’s pa looks at the time blinking over the oven. “Shit,” he says. “Then mow the lawn. When you’re done with that, all that, you can rest, eat, whatever.”

Harley says, “okay, daddy.”

His pa says, “I’m goin’ t’work now. You better be finished by the time I’m home, ya hear?” 

“I hear,” says Harley. 

His pa yanks on the shoulder straps of his dirty work overalls, sticks a foil-wrapped sandwich and a flask into a brown paper bag, and walks out the door, slightly hobbled. He always says he’s got bad knees from lifting heavy crates and such round the construction site. Harley prefers to imagine he’s got a secret peg leg, like a pirate from Peter Pan. 

Harley sniffles for a second or two, then goes upstairs to collect the laundry. When he slips quiet into his momma’s room to grab her dirty clothes, she stirs. She’s sat in bed, propped up by pillows, hands laced under the enormous swell of her stomach. She turns her face towards Harley and gives a weak smile. 

“Morning, peaches,” she says. “Whatcha up to?”

“Daddy asked me to do some chores,” Harley says, leaning head-first into the hamper to grab the socks at the bottom. He grunts, and catches the sock by the ankle. 

“Oh, baby, thank you,” his momma says. “You're such a good boy when you help out.”

“M’gonna be good, promise,” he says, muffled, in the dark of the hamper. He pushes himself off the edge and drops the socks into the laundry bucket. He scrambles over to the bed, leans up and onto the edge, his hands pressed into the layers of knit blankets and ratty quilts, and presses a kiss to his momma’s cheek. 

His momma runs a long-fingered hand through his hair and looks at him with the typa look he won’t understand for a long while yet. “I love you,” she says quietly. 

“Love you too, Momma!” he says, and immediately recognizes he is too loud, a moment shattered. “Love you, too,” he corrects, hushed. His momma needs a minute until she stops wincing, fingers kneading her temples. The tarnished band around her finger catches the early morning light and it blinks off the white walls. 

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Harley whispers. He backs away, tears rising in his eyes. “Sorry, sorry,” and he picks up the laundry basket with a huff, straining under the weight of it. He toddles out of the room, fingers aching, vision blurred, but makes it only a few steps until the basket slips from his grasp, the clothing tumbling out, the basket thudding on the hardwood. 

He hears his momma groan in pain. “Close the door, Harley, lord have mercy,” she says. 

“Sorry, Momma,” Harley says, and closes the door the quiet way, the way his pa taught him, one hand turning the handle and pulling towards himself and the other flat on the wood plank right below it, pushing. 

He presses his fingers against his eyes and lets one sob come shuddering out before drumming his hands onto his cheeks and pulling himself together. He scoops the clothing back into the basket and pushes it slowly across the hardwood, trying to minimize the friction, the sound of it gliding. When he gets to the stairs, he scrambles in front of the basket, taking the steps backwards in order to drag it down. When he makes it to the bottom without having dropped anything, he breathes a sigh of relief that stutters in his chest. 

“Okay,” he says out loud. “Now I just gotta split it all up. And do it a little bit at a time.” He plants his fists on his hips. Feels his stomach grumble. Sets to separating the colors. 

Once a load is in, the machine thumping unevenly, he sets to sweeping. Only the broom is a whole lot taller than him, longer than his whole body twice over, and it makes sweeping awful difficult. He has to find a way to maneuver the dirt and loose hair into the dustpan with the broom tilting heavy above him, and it takes so long and makes his arms so tired that, by the end, he’s crying again, just a little. 

_ “Why do you build me up,”  _ he sings under his breath, sniffling, mopping his eyes and his nose on his sleeve,  _ “buttercup, baby, jussa’ let me down.” _ He tosses the neck of the broom hand to hand. Leans it over his shoulder and pretends he’s dancing, the way his momma used to swing him around the room before she got pregnant and couldn’t get outta bed anymore. This was their song— the one she’d sing quiet and sweet when he was too riled to fall asleep; the one they belted out during car rides along the winding back roads, their tires kicking up a storm of dust behind them; the one she swung her hips to while stirring three pots at once at the stove. 

He hums the rest of the words, bouncing, breath hitching.  _ “You, more than anyone, darlin’,”  _ he sings. He spins. He angles the broom so the top of it can reach his mouth and sings into it like it’s a microphone, like he’s modeling as one of the guys off the sleeves of his favorite records— like Elton John, or Elvis Presley.  _ “Hmm mmm have from the start. So, build me up, buttercup, but don’t break my heart. Duuuh, dun dun dun,”  _ he finishes, wiggling, and a small smile grows on his lips. He lets it squeeze his eyes shut. 

He goes outside to water the garden. It doesn’t take too terribly long, not really, but mid-July is so densely humid that his hair plasters to his forehead and his shirt sticks to his back and his tongue feels all heavy and dry in his mouth. He stares up into the expanse of blue sky and realizes, quite suddenly, that it’s already past midday. 

He looks back down at their sad cucumber plant. “You oughta be trimmed,” he says to it. “D’ you think? S’it okay if I do it?” He raises his voice into something shrill.  _ “Oh, sure, Harley, thanks!” _ he says on behalf of the cucumber plant. “It ain’t nothin’,” he says, returning to his own tone, puffing out his chest and grinning. 

He gets the tiny pruning shears out of the garage and sets to cutting the dead leaves off. He puts them under the plant, around the stem, presses them into the dirt, and waters them a little extra, hoping the nutrients will help the plant get better. He read that in a gardening book from the library once. 

When he goes back inside, the laundry is done, so he needs to put in another load. He strings up the wet whites on the line outside, carrying a little plastic step stool with him so he can reach to clip everything real nice and neat, the way his folks would want it. 

His stomach whines. “Shh,” he tells it. 

He goes back to the garden, then. He’s gotta get something together for dinner, his pa said. The tomatoes look nice, sorta. And there’s two or three ripe peppers. Harley thinks he could put some rice in the rice cooker and stuff the peppers with it. His momma likes stuffed peppers; she said so once. 

He nods to himself. Good. He pulls some tomatoes and peppers from their vines. Brings them into the kitchen. Plops his step stool down in front of the sink. Washes everything up real nice, because they can’t have any dirt on anything or it won’t be safe for eating. 

He lugs the bag of dry rice out of the pantry and drops it onto the counter beside the wet tomatoes and peppers. He wrinkles his nose. It doesn’t feel like he’s done much to help, there, and he needs to do a real proper job so his momma will call him good and maybe his pa will be proud of him, too. 

But the knives look real big and scary. He can’t cut anything, or else he might hurt himself accidentally and momma might be upset. 

And it’s too early to put the rice in the cooker. It’ll get dry and stuck together by the time his pa is home. 

So he sighs and decides to start trying to mow the lawn instead of working on supper. 

The lawn mower is a little thing, the type you push rather than ride. It wheezes like a cat with asthma, and it doesn’t cut the grass evenly, but it runs. The alternative would be taking a pair of nail clippers and cutting every individual blade of grass that way, so Harley thinks this is better. 

The only problem is that his pa never really showed him how it works— just explained it in passing once. Harley is good at following instructions, he thinks, but he’s gotta see it put in front of him. He likes when the things he’s gotta build have brochures that fold out into enormous paper maps for him to follow. It’s hard to hear something and then figure it out. But reading it, that’s good. 

He tries to pull the cord on the side. It roars and the sound makes Harley jump with a squeak. He sniffles. 

“Aw man,” he mumbles. 

He tries again. It doesn’t start. Again. No cigar. 

He decides to check the laundry, tugging frustratedly on the curls at the nape of his neck. 

He hangs this second load, the dark clothes, on another line. The sun is getting low in the sky. He feels shaky, empty. 

He puts the last load in the washing machine. 

Decides to check on his momma. 

He makes it up the stairs, hanging close to the wall to keep the old floors from creaking. He stops a few inches from the door, drops slowly to his stomach, and peers under the crack of it. 

He can see her silhouette in the bed, laid flat, asleep. Her snuffling snores are just audible over the singing of the wind chimes outside her window. 

Harley chews his lip. Slides backwards, away from the door, and then scoots onto the top step. He leans his chin on his knees, wraps his hands around his ankles, and sighs. 

He sits for a while. He thinks he loses time, because when he blinks next, the hallway is painted ochre and amber like the sun is hanging low; like one of the angels spilled watercolor paints all across the sky. 

His heart stutters. “Oh, no,” he says aloud. He scrambles to his feet and rushes down the stairs. The laundry is already done washing. He whines, a keening little thing yanked out of the center of his chest, and goes to hang it up. The whites are dry, so he takes those down, putting them neatly in the basket. He’s not allowed to fold on account of him being God-awful at it, but he’s gotta keep everything from getting wrinkly. 

He puts the dried whites inside. Stares at the tomatoes and peppers and rice on the counter. 

Decides to put the rice in the rice cooker now, because it’s after five and his pa ought to be home soon. 

He goes outside again, then. The cicadas are coming out, starting to whistle, and some last birds croon lazily at the melted-sherbet sky. The grass is patchy in spots, goldenrod and pea green, and the wild onions are ripe. Harley runs right to the lawnmower, wipes his nose on his sleeve, and tries to start it again. It works, this time, and Harley takes a moment to thank any gentle spirit watching him, helping him. 

The noise hurts his ears, but he mows, and he mows, cutting straight rows of grass. The lawn isn’t enormous, but it’s big, and for a little guy like Harley, it’s hard work. He pushes as best as he can, but sometimes he gets caught in the uneven soil, and sometimes his lines are a little crooked, and he isn’t doing the best job ever, but it’s  _ his  _ best, and he hopes that’ll be enough for his pa. 

Harley’s almost halfway done when he gets home in his rumbling, dirty truck. 

He slams the door shut- Harley can hear it from where he is in the backyard- so he takes special care to stay quiet, close to himself. He keeps carving dutiful lines out of the grass, his shoulders by his ears, until his pa comes clambering out of the house and onto the back porch. 

“Didja’ do something for dinner?” he yells over the noise of the lawnmower. 

Harley flicks it off. It stops with a huff. “Um, yeah, I cleaned some tomatoes and peppers and I— and I cooked some rice in the thingy,” he says. “Cuz momma likes the peppers wif’ the rice inside.”

Harley’s pa looks at him. “So now  _ I _ gotta put it all together.”

“I couldn’ use the knives,” Harley says quietly. 

“Don’t  _ mumble,” _ his pa says, and Harley flushes. 

“I couldn’— couldn’ use the knives,” he says. 

“Then choose something you can actually finish next time, Jesus Lord,” says his pa. He sounds tired. Looks it, too, even from a distance, with his shoulders hunched and his head hanging. 

Harley says, “I’ll do it right next time, promise.”

His pa says, “you better.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. Quieter, as if he doesn’t mean for Harley to catch it, he says, “Christ, I could just— kill you today.” He hears it, still. It echoes across the vast emptiness of the yard, like a shout, like the grass carries it hand to hand and drops it before Harley, an offering. 

And then he’s back in the house. 

Harley turns the mower back on and finishes the lawn. 

By the time he’s done, it’s dark around him, lightning bugs flickering like bits of glitter tumbling outta heaven. 

He takes down the last of the laundry, lays it out in a basket, puts it all in the mud room to wait for one of his parents to be up to folding. 

His pa is already in bed. His momma still hasn’t gotten up. But he’s done. 

He takes a shower, climbs into bed with wet hair. He falls asleep quick. 

When he wakes up the next morning, his momma is sitting at the kitchen table, leaning far back to balance her belly. Harley feels something curious perk up in his chest. She’s almost never up. 

“Morning, Momma,” he whispers. Her head is always hurting these days, so it’s better to be cautious. 

“Morning, peaches,” she says, and her face breaks into a soft grin. Harley grins in response. He can’t help it. “I saw you did all your chores yesterday. Thank you, baby. You’re so good for us, ain’t you?”

Harley’s stomach whines. He smiles something stunning and sweet. “Thanks, Momma,” he says. He clambers up onto a stool and grabs an apple. 

If he’s really done good like his momma says, he can have his reward now. 

—

Harley has got some new books. The  _ Harry Potter _ ones. The librarian gave him a funny sorta look when he came up to the desk with all seven stacked in his arms, past his nose, taller than the crown of his head, but he thinks they’ll be a pretty quick read. He read a few chapters of  _ Les Miserables _ last week and found that terribly boring but comprehensible. These are kids books; they’ll be a cake-walk in comparison. 

He clambers out of his window and sits on the flatness of the roof, toes and fingers digging into the clefted tiles, still warm from the long-day summer sun. 

He reaches back into his bedroom, grabs the first two books, and a flashlight. He holds the torch between his teeth, lays flat on his back, and holds the book above his head, over a backdrop of pinprick stars. 

He, voracious, devours. 

—

Harley has a scar cutting through the front of his forehead, diagonal through the peak of his hairline. It’s jagged, uneven. Stands out stark against the ashy blond of his hair. 

He got it when he was only one and a few months. His pa told his momma he tripped into the wall. He was so young, after all, just learning to walk. Deer-like, long-legged, like knees were a new concept he hadn’t quite grasped. 

He knows, though, his pa had shoved him. He can still see it in his mind, loosely, in that faded sort of sepia old, old memories take the flavor of: the steel-toed boot crossing in front of Harley’s toddler feet, the hand pushing down on his shoulder, sending him sprawling into the corner between the dining room and the living room. Blood everywhere, and no ambulance close enough to come pick him up. His pa had driven him to the emergency care center with a clump of paper towels smushed against his forehead, grumbling the whole while about what a bother it was, about how he was missing work for this, not to let any blood drip onto the upholstery, eyeing Harley through the rearview mirror. 

A needle to numb his forehead, eight hasty stitches, and still Harley didn’t cry until his momma came bustling into the emergency room with red eyes and her apron ketchup-stained, strands of hair falling onto her neck from the ponytail she wore at work. She smelled so strongly of cigarette smoke it permeated even the pristine medicinal stink of the hospital, lingers low in the air of Harley’s memory. 

He still tries to style his hair to hide the scar. He never knows what to say when people ask him how he got it. 

—

Harley wakes up on a Wednesday feeling scarily trapped. Like his rainboots are caught in the mud, or the bus is running late and there’s no one home to drive him to school on time. Momma is still fit to burst, the baby two weeks past due. They don’t know when it’ll come, but Momma wants to do some natural birth in the bathtub and Harley has no desire to be anywhere near that. He read how different mammalian births work in a biology textbook a few weeks back and he still sees the diagrams when he closes his eyes sometimes.

He spends a long time laid out in bed, staring at the smattering of glowing star stickers on his ceiling. His momma had helped him put those up before she was too swollen to do anything other than drink sweet tea through a straw and whine about her cramps and read Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

Harley’s pa hasn’t been coming home much recently. Harley feels guilty that he’s relieved, but he hasn’t been hit in weeks. Not because his behavior is changed any; just since his pa isn’t around enough to see him, much less whack him. Or holler. Or get him with the wooden spoon for overcooking the pasta noodles. 

It’s not that his pa hits him every day when he’s around. Sometimes there’s weeks between, stretches of time that pass like molasses underfoot because they’re spent waiting for the moment to come, Harley holding his breath until he’s blue in the lips. It’s like marbles tumbling in his gut, slippery and loud. It’s far scarier, far more exhausting, than the split second he knows it’s coming. It could be worse, is all. Harley’s lucky. 

Momma never hits him. She doesn’t even holler. 

Not that his pa hollers all that much when his momma is around, either. His pa must love his momma. Harley knows his pa doesn’t hit his momma because sometimes, if he knows his pa is angry, he’ll sit outside their bedroom door at night, squatted on the floorboards with his little kneecaps pressing into his chest until his ankles go sharp with fritzing pins and needles, listening until they fall asleep, just to make sure. 

Sometimes, Harley wonders if his momma knows about the hitting and just doesn’t say anything. Maybe she agrees with it, or something. Either way, he doesn’t tell, because he thinks that would be like cheating. If he doesn’t take it like a man, how’s he learning his lesson? He’s gotta learn. That’s the most important thing, to keep learning, to be good, to be worthwhile. 

When he finally pulls himself from the sheets, it’s almost midday. He thinks the only reason he gets up is on account of how sticky it’s becoming in his cocoon, under the blankets, with the sun glaring onto his bed. 

He spares a glance for his bedroom— the absolute squalor of it all. The bookshelves are crowded with volumes that’ve tipped over, the spines uneven, no sort of order to it all. There are three different pairs of shorts bunched on the seat of his beanbag, a denim jacket hanging from the post of his bed, a cap tossed onto the dusty top of his dresser. His baseball bat and guitar are propped in the corner, the wood yellowish and gleaming with light from the half-open window. Two glasses of stale water sit on his nightstand. Even the line of rocks along the length of his windowsill is crooked. 

It itches deep in his bones. He still can’t bring himself to fix it.

He goes to brush his teeth in the bathroom, walking slow, bare heels hitting the hardwood too sharply and a fingertip dragging along the grey-painted wall. All their walls are grey. Harley thinks it’s boring. And sad.

He startles when he looks into the doorway and his momma is there, wearing a robe, squatted beside the tub. The sound hadn’t startled him. Rather, he hadn’t heard it at all. His stomach drops.

“Are you—?” he squeaks.

Mamma jumps a little, looking out into the doorway and then doing a double-take. “Oh, lordy, you walk like a ghost, Harley,” she says. “I’m just fixin’ a bath on account of I can almost feel Baby’s little hands reaching down and outta my body, and I want to be prepared in case she decides to make her appearance.”

“That’s nasty,” Harley says. 

“Damn right,” his momma agrees. 

“Can I just brush my teef’ real quick?” Harley says.

His momma frowns. “Shouldn’t you wait ‘til after you’ve had some breakfast?”

Harley shrugs. “M’not hungry.”

She keeps on frowning, looking at him. When she frowns, a little crease comes between her pale eyebrows. Harley doesn’t like it, so he steps forward and smooths it out with the pad of his thumb. 

It makes her chuckle. She stretches out her arms and catches him round the shoulders, tugs him into her chest. She rubs circles over his back, fingers catching on the knobs of his spine, and he presses his nose into the side of her neck, breathes in deep the scent of chamomile and cigarette and sweat. 

“You okay, peaches?” she says quietly.

“Mhm,” he says. 

“You come to me if you need me, okay?” she says. She pulls away just enough to meet his gaze, to push his bangs out of his eyes with a warm hand. “I know I’ve been… snippy lately, from feeling yucky and all,” she bumps his nose with hers, “d’you think you can forgive me?”

“Of course,” he says. 

She presses a kiss onto each of his cheeks, then sighs. “My old soul. You’ve got a brain with fifty years of wisdom inside of your little baby body, ain’t you?” She rubs her hands up and down the tops of Harley’s arms, shoulder to elbow, her skin chafing against the rough cotton of his t-shirt. “Oh, kid. What am I gonna do with you?”

Harley says, “dunno.”

She strokes his hair again. “I can’t wait for this damn human to come out of my stomach so I can go back to spending time with you again— properly, and all.”

Harley does not say  _ you worked so much before the baby that I never saw you then, either. _

With a deep breath through his nose, he wiggles out of his momma’s arms and leaves her to her bath. To her peace.

He forgets to brush his teeth, though. And that feels pretty gross. 

A quick pause to pull on his boots, and he goes outside, onto the lawn. He walks slow, feet sinking in the loam, feeling clumsy, heavy. Not even the country mirth can carry him. 

He stops in the center of it all, sits, and then lays himself flat. It itches; he’s always been just a bit allergic to grass. He feels hives rise on his chest. He scratches at his arms, red stripes cutting through a mess of bumpy splotches. 

Short-nailed fingers extend, grasp onto the blades, and he whispers, “Hades, if you wanna take me down to, uh, live with you, s’okay. I’ll clean up your palace, if you want. Persephone, I can just catch a ride with you when the chariot comes. It can’t be too long, s’almost fall now.” He breathes. Knocks the toes of his galoshes together. “I just don’t really wanna live here anymore,” he whispers. “It can be like a trade, like— like you do me a favor by taking me away, and I do you a favor by cleaning up for you. Deal? Sounds good to me.” He turns his head to the side, puts his ear onto the dirt, listens for an answer.

Doesn’t get one from Hades, but he thinks he can hear the very universe around him thrumming. The music of the earth’s crust pressing into itself, of rabbits burrowing, of worms inching their way through the dirt. Of the wind whistling through the heavy, green tree tops and the sun sighing in the eternal type of relief. 

Harley lays, and he quickly reddens from sunburn, and he listens.

—

Poppy June Keener is born on August seventeenth in a tin bathtub full of lukewarm water and sweat and gross innards and junk that Harley gags when he catches a glimpse of. She’s got a rock for a head with a fine down of dirty blond curls matted onto it, and eyes the color of broken Heineken bottles worn matte and rounded between stones in the reservoir. She whines, and she poops, and Momma cries for hours, but she says they’re happy tears. 

Henry Keener leaves the house in his pickup truck on August thirtieth and never comes back.

Harley’s momma still cries, and the baby cries, but Harley doesn’t. He’s too torn up between being terrified it’s his fault Pa left and hoping to God in heaven it  _ is _ his fault. That he was David, he took down the beast with a well-placed pebble from the mouth of his slingshot. 

(He thinks he’ll never miss his pa properly because he sees him in the night, when he closes his eyes; sees his shadows around the corners, thrown against the walls, ashy grey against pewter like rain-dampened concrete. Sees him places he never even was— at school, between the shelves in the library like the eye of Aberforth Dumbledore. Harley is haunted. He wonders if he should sneak into the chapel and steal some holy water, just in case. He’s heard ghosts can be violent. He wants all of that to be over, properly over, please,  _ please, please—) _

He tells Momma they should repaint the walls. Harley rides his bike over to the hardware store in town and chooses the colors. It takes three trips for him to bring them all home in the little wicker basket hanging from his handlebars. He drags the paint inside in his rusty red wagon and tells momma they ought to get to work. 

He has a ball of a time helping his momma- Poppy gurgling in a baby bjorn around her neck- smear the walls with Sundance yellow and Fresh Lime green.

(It’s easier to spot the shadows now than it had been against the plain grey.)

When they’re done, Momma doesn’t cry anymore. Not where Harley can see, anyway. 

—

Harley is in the second grade when he starts giving his lunch to the kids who come to school without one. He hands out an apple, splits a PB&J and gives half to Alyssa with the horse-patterned lunchbox and half to Zach with the buck teeth. He drinks his water and crosses his ankles under the table, feeling empty, feeling good. He did something good. That means when he gets home, he can eat. Maybe his momma will have something ready for dinner. 

And, if she doesn’t— well, maybe Harley oughta wait until Poppy is fed to try and eat himself. Maybe he’ll give her a bath, too. He’ll do his homework, wash the dishes in the sink. Check if the basil plants need pruning. Wash momma’s uniforms for her so she doesn’t have to stay up late doing it. That would be good. Then,  _ then, _ he’d deserve a meal, he thinks. 

—

Unlike most of the kids in his grade, Harley likes school. 

Tracing his fingers along the maps in his history textbook, where great rivers rage, where empires built themselves out of muddy dust and then tumbled back into the sand, ground beneath sandals and now carried across continents on the bottom of anthropolgists’s boots, he feels unshakable. Catching the patterns of the derivative problems in the special packets his teacher gives him while his classmates work on one-hundred-times-two, he feels at ease. Writing stories about kids who may look scrawny, who might not have friends, but who run away from home and save the world, he feels courage like a cape flying behind him. Painting Picassos with his fingertips, layering acrylics onto canvases, cut through with sharp lines from the palette knife, all reds and golds and greys, maybe like a fire, maybe like a sunrise over a distant city, smudging all over his overly large apron and in the ends of his hair, he is so much, he is so much. 

Reading and rereading his science books, learning more about engines, machines, fixing; about the only thing he’d learned from his pa before he’d left: how to build something, the type of thing that should never fall apart, whether it be the damn lawnmower or the car engine or the oven that sputters out more often than it works, he is useful. Harley can build; Harley can fix; Harley can make things good.

He wakes up early in the mornings because he likes being prepared. Physically, sure, but mentally, too. He read about being  _ mentally prepared _ in one of the psychology textbooks he got from the library. (The librarian has stopped giving him weird looks when he pulls things like  _ The Five Love Languages  _ and  _ A Brief History of Modern Dentistry. _ He has a bit of a reputation. At least he always returns the books undamaged; he’s careful because he knows the weight of words, even at his age.) The psychology textbook was relatively tame for his track record, really. It wasn’t such a long read. It taught him a lot, like how the way his momma can’t get out of bed sometimes probably means she’s got depression from the loss of her husband. Harley doesn’t bother trying to apply the symptoms to himself. The last time he did something of the sort, he ran to his momma crying that he had stage three leukemia. (He didn’t. He just feels like almost anything applies to him, always. He doesn’t know what he’s like, what he feels. All of it. None of it. He’s a rift, he swallows space.) 

His momma had shook her head and told him he got that from his pa— the way he jumps to conclusions.  _ Impulsive,  _ his momma said,  _ even though you’re always thinking so much. I dunno how you manage to be capricious and mild at the same time, but you do it, baby.  _

As far as he can list, the things his pa gave to him include: impulsivity, a guitar and the basic chord progressions and fingerings, a baseball bat with a dirt-filled crack on the handle, knowledge as to the inner workings of engines and circuit boards, bruises on every limb, and a penchant for bread-and-butter pickles. Oh, and a cap for the Smokies, who are really quite a shit baseball team.

From his momma, on the other hand, he thinks as he watches her bustle about, pouring vegetable soup into little thermos cups while pinning her bangs off her forehead, he got restlessness— they’re always on the move. Her at work, him running through the valleys outside, pressing footprints into the soft mud, petting all the neighbors' cows, knocking on doors and offering to fix electric kettles and doorbells. He’s got her bone structure and coloring, too. Her love of literature, of art, of movies, even though the only place it landed her was working garbage hours in just about every bar, diner, and cafe in the greater Rose Hill area. 

His momma had been in a movie once. Not a big one, and she wasn’t the main character, but it was a real, legitimate movie that played in a theater. She doesn’t talk about it, but she’s got a picture of her with some of the other actors on the wall going up their stairs. She was seventeen, still in high school, not yet pregnant. Harley wishes she still smiled the way she did in that photograph. 

Now, she continues to hasten around the kitchen, haggard, tossing a scarf round her throat, skidding in her stockings. “Gotta go save Mike’s ass for a few hours, baby,” she says to Harley. Mike is a new hire at the diner Momma is currently working at, and he’s completely incompetent. As far as Harley can tell, he’s young, and not very good at frying up pickles and chips and chicken tenders quite yet, but, too, makes a poor host, as he’s deaf in one ear; it takes three tries for him to hear how many people there are in a party before seating them. Momma is the only one nice enough to try and help him learn how to cook right, since he’s useless everywhere else. They don’t want to see anyone losing a job nowadays. 

Harley’s eyes trace Momma as she storms, still talking, more to herself than Harley. “God love ‘em, he can’t handle a shift without help yet. Foolish thing.”

“They can’t fire ‘im,” says Harley. “Who else’s gonna hire a half-deaf man with no marketable talents?”

Harley’s momma snorts, shaking her head in the disbelieving way she does when Harley pulls out what she refers to as  _ a Scrabble Word. _ “I’m sure he’s got some marketable talents… somewhere.”

“Maybe he can draw,” Harley suggests. “He could do new posters for the fish mart. The ones they’ve got up are all faded, y’know, from the sunlight.”

“Honey,” says his momma, “we’re tryin’ to get that fish market to close down; it don’t need any new signage.” She shivers. “There should be a law forbiddin’ the sale of fresh fish in landlocked cities, I swear to  _ Je-sus-Christ _ the savior,” she mutters, accenting every syllable. She wrenches the door open, turns over her shoulder, her eyes hardly visible between the wrap of her thick grey scarf and the bits of her choppy bangs already fallen out of the pins. 

Harley is struck by how young his momma is, all in one violent moment. He forgets, sometimes, because the bags under her eyes are so purple and she’s always doing things like taxes or reminding Harley to brush his hair or tuck his flannel into his jeans (which he ignores because he’s fairly certain that would be a fashion travesty). But she’s hardly got any wrinkles, and her cheeks are smooth and pink and her teeth are white and straight and she’s so beautiful, but she’s so lonely, and she’s so awfully young. 

“Have a good day at school, peaches,” she says.

“Good day at work,” he offers back, and she winks at him, clicks her tongue, and closes the door behind her. 

The kitchen seems to echo with the weight of sudden silence. 

He spares a glance at the clock over the oven, and is glad he does. Poppy’s overslept. He pulls himself off his stool and trudges upstairs, holding tight to the banister. 

They’re both at the k-through-twelve outside of town, these days. They walk up the plastic bus steps together, then sit in a two-seater hip-to-hip. Harley takes the window side, because Poppy’s got friends to talk to. They split up at the heavy glass double doors after sharing a fist bump, Poppy off to the kindergarten wing and Harley towards the elementary school. The whole place has broad hallways and lockers much taller than the littler kids. The walls are always whistling with something, the floors always roaring, the pipes always bursting, the heat going out. There’s ten kids in each year, give or take, and every footstep clatters like they’re tied in tap shoes strutting through a marble-floored museum after closing hour. It’s a ghost town. Like Goldilocks chose only  _ too big, too big. _

He comes to Poppy’s room. It used to be a spare, before Harley and his momma painted it bright yellow and strung fake flowers from the ceiling like a mobile and shoved stuffed bears into the corner. Now it’s dominated by her trundle bed, her white dresser, a rough dollhouse Harley built out of wood planks and reused nails for her most recent birthday. 

The blankets are tossed off the bed, a puddle on the hardwood. Poppy lies with her knees pulled to her chest, her wild curls like a bird’s nest around her head, sticking straight up in knotted bunches.

“Poppy,” he hisses. “Pop, wake up.”

She moans, long and pained.

He hurries into the room immediately, perches on the edge of her bed. He leans close to her face, squinting sideways at her in the dark. “What’s wrong, bud?”

“Hurts,” she whimpers. “Head. Belly. Sick.”

“You’re sick,” he repeats. 

She opens one eye and glares at him fiercely in the dark.

“Jeepers,” he mutters, and scratches his eyebrow. 

She sits up straight like a board, eyes wide. 

“Harley Harley Harley,” she says, and he stands. She shoots past him and into the hallway, audibly coming to her knees in the bathroom. Harley winces as he hears the splatter, and goes after her. He squats next to her on the tile, holding her mess of hair away from her face. She heaves, and tears begin to seep out of her eyes.

“Aw no,” Harley says, feeling his heart sink. 

She sniffles. 

“And Momma ain’t even home to watch you,” Harley says, patting Poppy on the back idly. He sits straighter, even as a strange anxiety builds in his stomach. “I’ll stay home with you, okay? Can’t leave you alone.” The thought of missing school is terrifying, odious. But leaving Poppy alone is eight times worse. 

“How d’you know how to take care’a sick people?” Poppy slurs out. “You’re only nine.”

“Almost ten,” Harley says, like a nine year old. 

She answers by leaning over the toilet and spitting out a mouthful of bile. Another few tears shine on her lashes, darken them like they’re smudged with makeup. “Harley,” she says, lips turned down at the corners, dimples in her round cheeks. “I don’ like it.”

“I know,” he says weakly. “Here, let me clean you up.” He crawls along the floor to open the linen closet and pulls out a washcloth. He dampens it under the bathtub faucet, then gingerly wipes at her cheeks, along her hairline, over her lips. He brushes the tears away with his thumbs, the way his momma used to do for him. The best he can do for Poppy is be like their momma, the way she was when Harley was littler. Without her here, someone’s gotta be her. 

Now that Harley thinks about it, maybe he’s been acting as her for longer than he’s realized. 

He helped change diapers when he was seven. It was his duty to blitz up baby food concoctions in the ratty, loud blender, and to feed them to Poppy after, no matter how fussy she acted. When he came home from school, he’d sit with her while he did his homework,  _ Little Einsteins  _ and  _ DuckTales  _ and the nature channel playing on the television, just keeping her company, listening to her babble nonsense and responding as if she had given him the answers to his math packet  _ (you’re right, Pop. Three thousand over twelve is two-fifty. You’re so smart already. Gonna be a genius, even better than me, I bet.).  _ He taught her to read, to write. They’re working on cursive now. It’s a secondhand workbook they’re using as a guide, but it’s good enough. 

There isn’t a thing he can think of that his momma did to raise Poppy all by herself. It hits him, fiercely and sour like stomach bile rising, that he doesn’t think he’d trust her to watch a sick Poppy alone at this point. For some reason, it makes his eyes sting, makes his throat ache like cello strings pulled taut. He blinks, and he wipes around Poppy’s mouth again for good measure, and he says, “okay, Pop. You and me. We can do this, right?”

She says, “I hope so.”

Carefully, he avoids saying  _ me too.  _

Harley leans forward and takes her hand. It’s small and chubby and round. He squeezes, runs his thumb along the line of her short little fingernails. “Um, d’you, d’you think you’re gonna be sick again?”

She thinks, her brows knitting together. She has the same little wrinkle between them that their momma does. It makes Harley sad. “No,” Poppy says. 

“Cool,” says Harley. “You’ve gotta tell me if your belly hurts again, though, okay?”

“M’kay,” she says, and sniffles. 

“Okay,” Harley says, and he steels himself. “Okay. Maybe we should, uh, go to the living room? And you can sit on the couch? And I’ll make you some toast.” He nods decisively. “Toast is good for sick people, I remember.”

“Who told you that?” says Poppy. “S’just bread, how could it be good for sick people?”

“Dunno,” Harley says with a shrug. (He’s lying. He knows it’s good because it’s bland and shouldn’t upset her stomach. But that— he wouldn’t have wanted to hear that at her age. Poppy still leaves water out in bottle caps for fairies and thinks the garden gnomes in their yard come to life at night.) “Magic, I guess.”

Poppy nods sagely. Then, she sighs, and pouts. 

“What?” Harley says. “Don’t be sad, you’ll make me sad too.”

She says, “just don’t feel good.”

His heart snaps like a skipping rope against stone. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“S’not your fault,” she says. 

Harley thinks about that. It sorta feels like maybe it is. If he’d done a better job watching her, keeping her clean and in check, she wouldn’t have gotten contaminated by the stomach bug germs. Then she wouldn’t be sick. Or maybe he hasn’t been feeding her enough veggies and her immune system isn’t up to snuff. 

Something crumples around his ribs and he caves, tumbling hard. How could she possibly think this isn’t his fault? If he’s the one watching her and she got sick, of course it is. Of course. 

His skin itches. He tenses, inexplicably, his subconscious waiting for a blow, a punishment. It never comes. 

He clears his throat, teary again, and mumbles, “whatever, let’s just, let’s just go.”

He stands, leans over, and lifts her off the floor with a grunt. She’s small, so small, but he is too. He plays in the yard, runs, swings his baseball bat at balls he throws straight up to himself, but he’s not strong. He’s noodly. 

This, though. Carrying his sister. Doesn’t matter how much it hurts; he’ll do it. 

Though his arms ache something fierce and his knees wobble like they’ve got screws loose, they make it down the stairs and to the living room in one gracious piece. In a swift motion, he deposits her on the couch, grabs a blanket off the back of the cushions, shakes it open, and drapes it over her lap. He then runs into the kitchen, skidding on the hardwood in his socks, and grabs a basin from under the sink. It’s this strange, faded, shell pink color and has always been unofficially known as the puke basin. He brings it to Poppy, puts it on the coffee table in front of her. 

“Okay,” he says, and pushes his bangs off his forehead with his fingers. He needs a damn haircut. Maybe he’ll do it himself later. He’s got a good eye; he could probably do a decent job. “This is for if you gotta throw up all of a sudden and can’t get to the bathroom. If you— I mean, you oughta try to get there before you, before you blow. But if it’s a sneak attack—”

Poppy’s nose wrinkles with a throaty giggle and he decides he’s said enough. 

He bounces on his toes for a moment, unsure what to do next, and chooses to flick on the television. Some early morning cartoons should be on. They don’t watch a lot of cartoons in their house, but maybe this is a good time for it. To distract her, and all. He finds ABC Family is playing Toy Story and hears Poppy say, “ooh,” under her breath as she watches the aliens in the claw game blink, glazed. 

“Um,” he says. “I’ll, uh, go make some toast now.”

“Magic toast,” Poppy says.

“Right,” he says. “It’s gonna heal you up.” He feels as if he hits some sort of stride for a moment, “yeah,” this is right, “I’ll read you the research. It’s really good. Doctor, uh, Andy,” he says, eyes flicking to the screen, “Andy Toyman. He’s an expert in the magical properties of— toast.”

“Cool,” Poppy says distractedly. 

Harley goes into the kitchen. 

“I don’t know how to make magic toast,” he says to himself. 

He tries anyway. Whole wheat bread, but the kind without the seeds because Poppy hates seeds in bread. She says it’s like fish tank pebbles stuck in cardboard. Harley doesn’t agree, but he empathizes. 

With two slices of bread in the toaster, he sets to making some tea to settle her stomach. Momma has a lot of special teas, and oil droplets she drinks in water or puts in the diffuser. Chamomile, hibiscus, earl grey. Lavender, lemon, frankincense. Harley likes the eucalyptus, but he’s looking for peppermint. Both— the tea and the oil. There can’t be too much peppermint, he doesn’t think. 

He puts the tea bag in a mug and sticks it in the microwave, gets distracted watching it spin. 

Unearths the diffuser from beneath the sink, plugs it in, and pours in the water. He reads the bottle of peppermint oil, but receives no instruction, so he plops something like ten drops in and figures that’s good enough. 

That’s about when the sharp stink of burning bread hits him with a wallop and he sadly says, “aw, magic toast,” below his breath. 

He clambers onto the edge of the counter, pushing himself up so he can reach the toaster better. The bread hadn’t popped up, so he tilts the whole thing onto its side and shakes the slices out. One blackened piece tumbles onto the paper plate he’d set out, a shower of crumbs following it, but the other stays wedged against the springs. It takes him sticking a finger inside to remove it, and he burns the living heck out of three knuckles, but he gets it out. He carries both slices over to the sink and shaves away at the charred tops with the knife as best as he can. The edges stay dark, but. There isn’t much way to fix that. 

“Magic toast,” he mutters. “Magic toast, magic toast. Oh!”

He slathers on a thin layer of butter, and then dusts the tops of the bread with some leftover red and pink sprinkles from Valentine’s day. Momma and Poppy and him had made cookies, the kind with a big thick layer of frosting on top. Harley doesn’t like sweet stuff all that much, but he had loads of fun smearing frosting onto Momma and Poppy’s cheeks when they were distracted. 

Harley brings the plate and the tea to Poppy before going back into the kitchen. Finally, he stops to run his horribly stinging fingers under lukewarm water from the faucet. 

He tilts his hand sideways under the stream and watches the water glimmer over the bright white marks striping across his middle finger, ring finger, and pinky. He gives himself all of a minute, maybe, to sniffle and draw the heat out, and then he slathers some Neosporin on and wraps all three knuckles in bandages patterned with Iron Man in various poses of virile heroism. Harley looks at them and feels bolstered, emboldened. 

Harley grabs a knit cap on his way back into the living room, where Poppy has dove into her toast with gusto. Butter is smeared shiny on her cheeks, and sprinkles cling to her lips. Harley yanks the hat over her curls, murmuring, “you cold? Shivery? Y’oughta wear a toboggan, at least, keep your head warm. Won’t that make the illness go away? Prob’ly. I mean, I dunno. Worth a shot, right, Pop?”

“Dis toast is goo’,” she says around a mouthful. 

“Magical?” Harley asks. 

“Maybe,” she says. 

“Alright,” says Harley, chalking that up as a win. 

He goes to grab his backpack from his bedroom, then. If he isn’t going to school, he ought to work on some practice problems, at least. 

Toy Story bleeds into Hercules on the television, and Poppy wraps herself in a cocoon of blankets, sniffling into her sleeve, the basin resting on her bent knees. Harley curls up in the big leather recliner by the window- the one striped with scratches from denim pockets and belt buckles and worn down smooth and soft and three shades lighter from years of comfortable weight- and chews on the strings of his sweatshirt while riddling out improper integrals, an abused graphing calculator on the arm of the chair. 

Poppy doesn’t speak, but she lets out a whimper every few minutes, as if reminding Harley she’s there, she’s alive, and she’s absolutely miserable. Maybe Harley is a sap, but it tugs his heartstrings every time. He’s so mushy for her. He’d upend mountains and raise valleys into the sky on his shoulders for her. She’s his best friend, even though she’s so little, because she’s clever and funny and spunky. 

Harley bites down on his lip, watching her eyes go wet as Megara’s soul slips from her body. Poppy sniffles once, twice, pale, eyes red-rimmed, and then she says, “oh no,” and heaves into the basin, shoulders hunched, sobbing. 

Harley shoots up from his seat, his packet and pencil clattering to the floor in his haste to get to Poppy’s side. He rubs her back in small circles as she cries, spitting mouthfuls of sick, and the room smells awful even through the cloud of peppermint steam, and just when Harley thinks he couldn’t feel more helpless, Poppy says, “I want Momma,” and then, louder, “I want Momma,” and she weeps it, a litany, “Momma, Momma, Momma,” and Harley, face hot, throat tight, wrinkles his nose as his face folds and says, “me, too.”

They sit on the couch, hip to hip, stinking of vomit, and cry terrible, lonely tears, until the movie has long stopped. 

Harley mops his face on his sleeve and says, “I’m sorry I’m not Momma.”

Poppy says, “I miss her.”

“I know,” Harley says. 

Poppy says, “why doesn’t she ever take care a’me?”

“She’s busy working for us,” Harley says. 

Poppy says, “what if we need her  _ here?”  _

“I’ll always be with you, when you need me,” Harley says. 

Poppy sniffles, staring up at him with wide, bloodshot eyes. Harley can’t take it. 

He squeezes the pompom at the top of the hat. “Honk,” he says.

Poppy blinks at him, unamused.

“Let’s go clean you up,” Harley says. “A bath. A warm one. Yeah?”

“Okay,” Poppy whispers. 

Harley takes the basin from her, careful to keep it from sloshing, sets it in the sink for the time being. He squints at it. Is he supposed to— can the disposal handle that? There are some sprinkles in there, Christ Alive. Harley’s feeling green around the gills himself once he’s marched himself upstairs to help Poppy put up a bath.

He runs the water warm and dumps in a considerable amount of lavender scented bubbles. 

“Want some toys?” he asks.

Poppy, sitting on top of the closed toilet seat with a deeply mournful pout to her lip, nods solemnly. “Barbie mermaid,” she says.

Harley collects the Barbie mermaid with the pink tail and tosses it in the tub. He follows it up with a Barbie motorboat and three rubber ducks in the garb of a pirate, a chef, and a chemist respectively. 

The warm water stings his burns as he swishes his hand through it, trying to urge the bubbles to form. He helps Poppy clamber into the water. 

She scoots down until her shoulders are under film of bubbles, and begins to swim the Barbie back and forth over her stomach. “She’s going to punch a dolphin,” Poppy says.

“Why?” asks Harley. “What’d dolphins do to deserve that?”

“Annoying,” Poppy says. 

“The noise they make?”

“Mhm,” Poppy says. Barbie’s tail swishes in the bubbles. “Too loud. Too high. Annoying.”

“Hm,” says Harley. 

He sits cross-legged on the tile and watches Poppy mime punching dolphins on Barbie’s behalf. The room is overly warm and Poppy’s hair seems to melt, the ends growing wet and sticking to her back and her forehead. The skin of her nose and her cheeks goes pink beneath her freckles. 

Eventually she holds up a hand and says, “pruney. Out.”

Harley says, “gotta wash your hair first, stinker.”

She says, “I  _ hate _ you.”

Harley says, “I know. It’s part of our charm, as a duo.”

She says, “what’s charm?”

He says, “uh, nevermind.”

Using a little plastic pail, he unceremoniously dumps water onto her head. As it streams over her face, into her mouth and over her scrunched eyes, she sputters and gurgles out a weak,  _ “Harley,”  _ and he feels a little bad because she’s ill but, c’mon. It’s kinda funny. 

He lathers shampoo between his hands and massages it into her hair, much more kindly. Poppy keeps her eyes closed and lets herself sway with the pressure of Harley’s fingers. When he rinses the shampoo out, he’s gentle, holding a hand like a visor over her eyes. 

He pulls the plug on the drain and takes a towel down from the rack on the wall. She stands, and he wraps her before scooping her up and sitting her on the countertop, a corner of the towel over her head like a hood. He takes a second towel and uses it to dry her cheeks, under her eyes. It goes around her as a second layer, then, and he carries her into her bedroom to finish up. He sits her on her bed and collects clean pajamas for her to wear, helps her put them on. As Harley pulls out the hair drier, she starts yawning, big, gaping things. 

“You can sleep,” he tells her. 

“Mph,” she says. 

He plugs in the hair drier and sets to work, sitting behind her on the bed and combing his fingers through her knotty curls. She sways under the weight of her exhaustion. Harley leans her back against his stomach and lowers the heat of the blow drier as to not burn her face. It’s quick, the way she falls asleep. There one moment and gone the next, like her consciousness has slipped straight out of her chest. 

Harley flicks the hair drier off and inches Poppy flat onto the mattress. He picks the blankets up from where Poppy had tossed them in her sleep the night before, shakes them out, drapes them over her. 

He cleans the puke basin in the sink. It’s the worst, most disgusting thing he’s ever experienced, even though he wears rubber gloves. 

With the basin, now clean, tucked under his arm, he goes back into Poppy’s room. He sets it on the bed beside the lump of her, pulls out the trundle, and lays himself on it. 

The sun drifts across the sky, casting long shadows across the room, painting it like ochre and honey and lemon zest. Poppy’s room gets good afternoon light, the type that feels liquid and flowing and languid. It turns everything smoother, richer. 

Time drips. 

Harley’s momma gets home from work while Poppy’s still asleep. 

With a wince at the noise of the front door slamming open, Harley sneaks out of the bed and tiptoes down the stairs, shushing his momma before he’s even reached the kitchen. 

“Poppy’s asleep,” he hisses, and Momma jumps, clapping a hand to her chest. 

“Why are you home?” she says, too loud. 

“Shh, shh, please,” Harley says, “she’s barely asleep. She’s sick.”

“Poppy’s sick?” Momma says, unwinding her scarf. Her hair is dusted with light snow, the shoulders of her coat like she’d rolled in powdered sugar. The bags under her eyes are purple, seem deeper. 

“Yeah,” Harley says, “she threw up twice. This morning and— and a few hours ago.”

“And you stayed home with her?” Momma says. 

Harley’s heart stutters. “Oh— I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have skipped school for any other reason, ‘specially without permission, it’s just that I didn’t want her to be alone, really, I’m—“

His momma’s shoes click against the tile as she approaches and Harley’s eyes close of their own accord. His shoulders come up around his ears and he turns his cheek into the left one, hiding it, bracing himself, but his momma’s arms come around him tight in a plume of that cigarette stink that has become something of a comfort to him and she isn’t hurting him, she’s  _ holding _ him, she’s pressing kisses on the top of his head and whispering, “thank you, my big, grown boy, you’re so good, so good for your momma.” And Harley’s heart is pounding, painful, surely she can hear it echoing in the walls around them, see it shaking the wimpy chandelier dangling over their heads, feel it against her chest through her coat, because it’s quivering through Harley’s whole body down to the tips of his fingers and his head is aching behind the eyes and he thinks he’s scared, numbingly scared even though Momma is just loving on him. 

With one last squeeze, Momma pulls back, brushing a curl out of Harley’s eyes. The grin she sends him is brilliant. His breath is stuttering. The refrigerator starts to hum. Her grin slips. 

“What’s wrong, baby?” she says. 

“No-nothing,” he says. 

“Hmm,” she says. She strokes his hair again. He keeps carefully still. “Maybe you’re just tired?” 

_ Yes,  _ Harley wants to shout,  _ but not the sleeping type.  _

“I’m gonna try to— nap,” Harley says. 

“Okay,” Momma says quietly. “If Poppy needs me, you’ll come get me, right?” 

“Sure,” Harley lies. 

Instead of turning into his bedroom when he’s crested the last stair, he heads back into Poppy’s room on careful feet and returns to the trundle. He burrows his head beneath the pillow and focuses on making his breaths long and even until he drifts into that in-between, that place not quite dark enough to be sleep but not quite loud enough to be awake. It’s like floating down the Lethe in a hand-carved canoe; he is something, but he is no one. 

When Poppy clambers out of the bed and runs into the hallway to puke again, Harley is roused by her bare feet clapping onto the hardwood. He pulls himself clumsily out of the sheets, and holds her hair as she throws up. 

Momma doesn't hear. Or, if she does, she doesn’t come. 

He cleans her again, ties her hair in a loose thing that maybe could be called a braid if he squints a bit and looks at it sideways. He sits beside her on her narrow twin mattress as she falls asleep, stroking her back, her arms wrapped around his knees and her nose pressed into his thigh. 

It seems she’s out, deeply under with slow, belly-filling breaths, when she mumbles, “love you,” and Harley’s heart leaps into his throat, ricochets off the walls of his ribs. 

“Love you too,” he says, and hopes wildly that she never turns out like him. 

—

Harley is ten now and people tell him  _ all the time  _ how lucky he is to be so skinny. A lot of kids from Rose Hill aren’t, y’see, because Rose Hill might not have a hospital or a hotel but they’ve got a diner and two fast food joints and those are viable options for parents working double-triple-graveyard shifts and getting paid in pocket lint and “I-owe-you’s.”

He and Poppy and their momma are all small. Short, too, but thin, mostly. Birdlike wrists, a slapdash mix of sharp angles and high arches along their feet and ankle bones like bolts sticking out of their shins. Cheekbones and pointy chins, they’re snapped arrows and loose strings and twigs underfoot. 

Harley likes it— being skinny. He thinks it’s the only lick of luck he’s had in his whole entire life.

—

When Harley forgets to defrost the chicken for his momma because he’s too busy reading  _ As You Like It _ under his covers (and yearning with a ferocious, girthy ache in his chest to be able to run off into the woods and don a new name, a new face so impeccably applied that no one would ever know it to be him, oh, to be Rosalind), he feels something cold slip down the length of his torso. Like drinking water first thing in the morning. Like the lake frozen under his skates. 

He sets it on the counter late. It isn’t room temperature by the time she’s home. She doesn’t holler, but her eyebrows settle low over her eyes and the creases at the corners of her lips seem to deepen. She says, “it’s okay, Harley,” in this tired voice, and Harley thinks it is most definitely far from okay. 

He says, “is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

She says, “no, no. Just go back to your room.”

He starts up the stairs and his heart commences hammering with such ferocity that he pulls himself, weak-kneed, into the bathroom, to toss a few handfuls of cold water onto his face. Over time, he’s found this tends to help him focus. It sends his mind slamming back into his body, cools his red cheeks. 

He catches his own gaze in the mirror. Sucks on his front teeth, traces his tongue over the slight twist of the left one. 

He messed up bad. Momma isn’t mad at him. 

He’s mad at himself. 

His eyes slip lower, catch on his thighs, poking out of the hem of his shorts. They’d been pants, once, grey sweatpants, but he’d gotten too tall for them even if he hadn’t gotten too wide. So he cut them. Saving money. 

He stares at his knees. The blond down of hair over them. The socks curling at his ankles. 

He closes the lid of the toilet and sits on it. The porcelain is cold against his skin. Too smooth. 

He tilts his head to the side, appraising. Lifts his fist, feels a rush in his stomach. Sends it hurtling into the soft face of his thigh. His knuckles pop. He stretches them. Looks at the redness blooming at the edge of his shorts. 

Lifts his fist. Cracks it down again. Again. Again. 

If no one else will do it for him, he ought to do it himself. Like every other thing around this damn house. 

—

Two times a month, Tony Stark calls Harley on the tablet he left for him in his souped-up garage.  _ Now we’re really connected,  _ said the handwritten note folded and jammed into a seam of the cardboard box it came in. The note is pinned on the wall in Harley’s bedroom next to a watercolor painting he did of some of the local flora and a postcard from New York signed by Tony and Pepper. 

Pepper is nice; Harley’s met her in passing on a phone call or two. She’s almost always yelling at Tony, but in a fiercely caring, sweet way, full of an adoration completely foreign to Harley. He likes watching it like he likes watching a sitcom: it’s something he’ll never have, but damn if it doesn’t seem swell.

Once a year or so, Tony Stark comes to Rose Hill for a weekend, sleeps on the pull-out couch, makes some complex Italian dish, and then leaves. 

Sometimes Harley looks at Tony sitting on their leather chair, bouncing Poppy on his knees and smiling with crinkles at the corners of his eyes and sipping tea with Momma, and Harley thinks he fits. Maybe it’s because Harley is selfish. Maybe it’s because he’s empty and something about Tony is so robust, so enormous, that being around him fills Harley’s cup to overflowing. But Tony always goes at the end of the weekend. 

Harley does not resent him for this because he does not understand that maybe he  _ should.  _ Does not understand, still, that not everyone leaves. He takes the carbonara and  _ pasta aglio olio _ for what they are. Eats them with his chin tucked. Works with Tony in the garage, enduring all measures of hair ruffles and shoulder squeezes and trying his darndest not to flinch because if Tony asks he’ll never have an answer. Gives him a tight hug when he goes to leave, inhaling machine grease and espresso and sharp cologne and letting out a smoky little bit of his ghost. 

And gets back on with his life. 

—

Harley is thirteen and he doesn’t think he’s strange anymore. He thinks he’s sad, instead. 

He likes the pale way the moonlight shines through the skin of his hands. He looks silver and statue-like. Adonis and Aeneas and all the heroes are marble like him. 

He lays flat on the roof tiles, drowned in the blue light of post-dusk, ashy lavender and damp grass and humidity like wading through a watering hole, holds a hand up above him. Catches the big dipper in the junction of his thumb and forefinger. He’s the stuff of dreams, he thinks. 

He reads  _ The Bell Jar,  _ and Ginsberg’s  _ Howl,  _ and loves them so deeply that he annotates his copy of the former and posts a four-page double-sided printout of the latter on his bedroom wall beside his Indiana Jones poster and the sleeve of a Bowie record that Poppy accidentally broke when she was still toddling. 

_ I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,  _ Harley thinks. He highlights it blue. 

—

Sometimes Harley looks in the mirror and gets nauseous. Right off the bat, without doing anything, really. Maybe it’s the angle where his chest meets his shoulder. Or the softish spot between his hip bones and the bottom of his ribs. Or the way his chin tucks when he laughs. Or something else entirely. All he knows is he can’t, he absolutely cannot, stand to look at it for much longer than it takes to make sure he’s wiped the toothpaste from the corners of his lips and gelled his hair properly. 

When he tries on some new jeans he grabbed at the Salvation Army and shows Poppy what they look like on him and she grins and shoots him two thumbs up, he wants to get on his hands and knees like he’s bowing to a foreign god and heave until his stomach comes flying out his mouth. He’s never felt like this before. But he does now. And he’s scared. Because even if he’s never particularly liked himself, nowadays he thinks he  _ hates  _ himself, viscerally, fiercely, and that seems not good, not good at all. But he can’t stop.

This is about when Harley starts throwing away his dinners every time he can get away with it. 

He stares at the pasta with asparagus and tomato sitting on his plate like it’s personally challenging him. It is. It is. Crickets hiss through the window. The kitchen has grown dark. It wasn’t dark when he sat down. He shifts some of the noodles with his fork. Sighs. 

His momma cooked tonight. She’s been on a kick the last week or so, taking shifts starting at three in the morning so she’s home by midday, sleeps then, and cooks for them in the evening. It’s wildly disconcerting. 

Harley spears a cherry tomato. Glares at it, because he does not want to be like this (but he thinks he already is, has been, was born and bred to be this, to be little). 

With a sudden urge to rip his midriff into rags, Harley picks up his plate, crosses to the trash can, and swipes it all into the bin. 

There’s a creak from the hallway. 

His gaze shoots up as his gut plummets and he catches eyes with Poppy, peering around the doorway. 

“What’re you doing?” she asks. 

Harley feels like he’s frozen in Dante’s hell, stuck in the ice like three-headed Lucifer, watching him gnaw on the sinews of liars. 

“Couldn’t you have just saved it in a tupperware, if you’re not hungry?” Poppy says, and Harley breathes. 

“I, uh,” he says, “I coughed on it, and I think I might be— coming down with something, so. Yeah. Safer this way.”

“It wasn’t very good, was it,” Poppy says in a stage whisper. 

Harley laughs, something shrill and sharp. “Not really,” he agrees. He wouldn’t know. He didn’t take a single bite. 

Poppy nods. “Gonna get a glass of water,” she says. She pads into the kitchen on sock feet and opens a cabinet, perusing on tip toe, lithe and long even in her flannel pajamas. She’s the prettier one, of the two of them. She’s got nicer bone structure. Where she looks like a dryad, sprung from the roots of a maple, Harley looks like a wraith. 

“Can you not tell Momma?” he says, fast, wincing as soon as the words have slipped off his tongue. 

Poppy peers at him over her shoulder. “Why not?” she says. 

“Because,” Harley runs a hand through his hair, “I’ll just feel real bad if she knows I didn’t— like it.” 

“S’that why you’ve been sneaking so much?” Poppy says. “Waiting ‘til after we’re in bed to eat, and then acting all quiet and putting it back in the fridge so Momma won’t be offended by you not liking her cooking?”

Harley wants to sink straight through the floorboards. He has never felt this terrible. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s exactly why.”

Poppy nods sagely. Finally takes down her glass. Fills it at the tap. Wraps an arm around Harley’s shoulders and squeezes him. “Secret’s safe with me,” she says. “G’night, Harls.”

“Night, Pop,” he says, and leans over to press a quick kiss to the crown of her head. 

She goes upstairs. 

He presses his palms into his eyes and crumples silently to the tile, feeling bone-deep tired. 

—

_ “Hey kiddo, what’s—?” _

“Shut up I need to show you something right now,” Harley says loudly, positioning his tablet very carefully at the foot of his bed, against his headboard, wedged between loose pairs of socks to keep it upright. With a groan, he leans over the edge of his mattress and grabs the orange Gibson Tony had sent him for his last birthday by the neck, dropping it in his lap, shifting the cord so it can reach his little amp without pulling. His veins are humming. 

He places his fingers on the strings. He’s shaking a little bit. A film of black coffee coats the inside of his mouth, bitter. 

“I learned something very cool, so cool and you are going to love this because it’s impossible but it isn’t impossible because I did it,” Harley announces.

Tony is squinting at him from the tablet screen, his face stretched to fit corner to corner, the angle giving a glamour shot straight up his nose.  _ “I’m ready. Amaze me.” _

Harley takes a deep breath, and then pauses. He twists his lips. He doesn’t know why he bothered Tony with this, actually. It’s just a stupid song; millions of people can play it, surely. And based on the grease streaks along Tony’s cheekbones and the bags under his eyes, he hasn’t been sleeping well, so Harley’s imposing on time he might need to get stuff done.

_ “Why do you look so broody all of a sudden?” _ Tony says, startling Harley, who briefly experiences the thrill of free fall before his consciousness settles into his skull.

Harley meets Tony’s eyes, then looks away. He catches his own face in the corner of the screen and is immediately nauseated: he looks lustreless, grey where he was once silver, ash where he was once stardust. His skin is waxen, almost pellucid pulled over the angles of his cheeks, his chin, his jaw. A monument in alabaster. Knock it down. It’s done its time.

He can’t remember the last time he’s looked in a mirror. Or seen himself, really. It’s like looking at the portrait of Dorian Gray in the early phases, when it wasn’t yet full of maggots and vengeful spirits. 

He thinks he’d look more alive if he resembled the latter. 

Sick to his stomach, his eyes hover back over Tony’s expectant expression. He heaves a breath, shakes out his fingers, and says, “anyway, here’s Wonderwall.”

Tony’s laugh acts as a harmony to the first few bars of riffing to Van Halen’s  _ Eruption,  _ the magnum opus of Harley’s guitar practice over the six months he’s had the electric. The vibrations ding up the bones of his arms, sting his fingers, and he carves out note after note, a handful of chords and a wild rush of plucking, his tongue poking between his lips in concentration. 

He finishes, lets the last chord ring in the air, and looks up towards the tablet screen.

Tony is grinning like a fool, his entire face shining in that unbidden way that shaves years off his skin, brings light back into his eyes.  _ “Kid, that was so badass,”  _ Tony says gleefully.  _ “What the hell, how did you do that with your little baby fingers?” _

Harley shrugs with one shoulder, face hot. “Dunno. Not that hard, really, I probably— oversold it.”

_ “Not that hard,”  _ Tony scoffs.  _ “That just— you offended me, and Eddie Van Halen, and God all in one fell swoop. Watch out for any random lightning you see out there in Bumfu— uh, the middle of nowhere, because it’s a gift from God, with the intention of smiting you specifically.” _

Harley rolls his eyes. 

_ “Hey,”  _ Tony says. He leans back in his chair at the lab table, adjusts the angle of his screen to be less invasive of his sinuses.  _ “Continue the concert. It’s compensation for the birthday gift; I give you the guitar, you have to keep playing for me. Whip out something good, something iconic, gimme some Elton John or something.” _

“Elton on guitar?” Harley says, scowling. “Nah, I’ll— I know what’ll be good,” and he switches out his Gibson for his old, scratched acoustic, checks the tuning, and then starts to pluck out Fleetwood Mac’s  _ The Chain.  _

The theme of this song is far easier to play than Van Halen’s. One of the first riffs he learned was the iconic, thumping bass line. 

_ “Oh, good gravy,”  _ Tony says.  _ “This takes me back.”  _

Harley sings.  _ “Listen to the wind blow,” _ he starts, voice rough from disuse.  _ “Watch the sun rise,” _ he continues, clearer. This song is practically carved into the front of his skull, right above his eyes. It comes easy.

_ “And if you don’t love me now,” _ Harley sings. He looks up, gives Tony a pointed stare. 

_ “You will never love me again,”  _ Tony jumps in, his voice husky and frustratingly good, like some sort of Frank Sinatra and Bruce Spingsteen hybrid. 

_ “I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain,”  _ they sing together. Tony does the echoes. They laugh wildly in between lines, trading off, Tony doing some stupid Madonna-esque Vogueing that makes Harley howl and spinning his chair. The robots move jerkily in the background, DUM-E swinging his little claw as if he’s dancing. Harley’s laugh is fast, loud, almost maniacal. He’d forgotten. 

Harley finishes the song. Tony shoots to his feet and claps, whistles, says,  _ “goddamn it, kid, I don’t even want you to join the family business if it’s keeping you from doing  _ that _ for the rest of time,” _ and suddenly Harley is crying. 

He sniffles, laughs a little, wipes his face. “Thanks, Tony,” he says.

Tony leans closer, his expression going a little stiff. The wrinkles at the corners of his nose deepen.  _ “Are you— crying, are those tears, because you know emotions give me hives.” _

“No,” Harley says, and his breath hitches. “Not crying.”

_“Good,”_ Tony says, still squinting. When he scrunches up his face like that, he looks older. Weathered. _“Although, uh. If you were. I’d tell you it’s okay to cry, even though I am— wholly and completely confused as to why you are doing it, currently. And I would also tell you that I am—_ _I’m very proud of you for, y’know, learning all that by yourself. And showing me. I enjoyed it a lot.”_

“Tony,” Harley says.

_ “You’re a good kid,” _ Tony whispers.  _ “I’ll come visit soon, okay? Promise. I’ll text you.” _ He winks, then hangs up. 

Harley mops his face and stares at the black screen.

—

Harley gets glasses for his nearsightedness, his full driver’s license, and trades his rusty red wagon for a rusty red hand-me-down truck all in the same week. It’s an eventful few days, overwhelming and packed and all Harley wants by the time it’s done is to sleep and sleep, laying in the warmth of the sun in the bed of his truck, his skin going pink and freckly and the insides of his eyelids turning crimson against the sunlight. 

He does not get this, because nothing ever slows down. Momma takes double-shifts so Harley cooks. Missus Next-Door’s porch swing had fallen apart in a late-September gall and now she wants Harley to fix it. Poppy won’t stop stealing his glasses to wear in her Snapchats. Harley is only ticked off about it because the keyhole shape looks better on her than it does on him.

The new license is undoubtedly the highlight out of everything going on. Not only can Harley’s momma stop worrying about having to drive Poppy seven ways to hell every day of the week to meet with friends, but now the two of them can drive to school rather than taking the bus. Anyone who has ever been on a school bus would understand the benefits therein. 

They feel like something out of a coming of age movie, riding in their wheezy pick-up. Poppy rests her crossed ankles on the dashboard because she’s a heathen, and Harley hangs a bundle of lavender buds from the rearview mirror to keep it smelling nice in there. The way the early morning light hits the florets- pinkish like cotton candy when the carnival comes to town- against the background of yellow wheat through his windshield is like jewels lying on a mountain of cloistered gold, like dripping riches borne of the soil. They park in the back of the lot so they get to walk the long stretch to the school as if they’re in slow-motion, their steps bouncing but smooth, their hands tucked into their pockets, their eyes slightly squinted. They’re both very dramatic.

They’ve had an early start today, so Harley’s taking the roads slow. Sometimes, around the harvest when the farmers are distracted, the animals get loose and end up in the road, and then Harley has to herd a cow or a few chickens onto the shoulder and make a call to whoever owns the poor beast. Not this morning, though. It’s pristinely quiet, the only sounds being the humming of Harley’s engine and early morning birdsong and the whistle of crickets in the grass. The windows are lowered; October air is the best kind of cool, thin and dry and crisp. Like something out of a Keats poem. Something the stoned Romantics in the mountains would’ve strived to embody but never quite captured for its ephemerality. 

“Why don’t you have friends?” Poppy blurts. 

The car jerks as Harley jumps while pulling through the intersection of Rose Hill’s only traffic light. Harley lets up on the gas, then eases back onto it. “I have friends,” he says. He’s not really lying— he still talks to EJ when they make eye contact in the hallway. He has a few phone numbers saved in his cell from group projects. And he’s not one of those kids that didn’t ever adopt social skills. The full ability to have friends sits ready in a pocket on his tool belt. Right alongside his desperate desire to have exactly no communication with any of the kids in his grade. In his  _ school. _ Other than Poppy, of course. 

“Not really,” Poppy says dryly. “A fifty year old mechanic living a thousand miles away doesn’t count.” That stings more than Harley would like to admit. “You’ve never— you go to the library during lunch, and you aren’t in any clubs, and you don’t talk to anyone at all during your choir rehearsals. Jean’s sister is in choir with you, Jean told me.”

“People talk about me behind my back,” he says. 

“No,” Poppy rushes to correct, “no, I just— I asked Jeanie if her sister had ever said anything about you, and she said that her sister says you just don’t talk much. Not in front of the group, anyway.”

“Huh,” Harley says. 

“And,” Poppy says, pushing herself a little straighter in her seat, as if she’s about to get Serious, “she said she doesn’t understand why you don’t talk, because you get solos and stuff and you never look like those bother you, to perform in front of strangers.”

Jean’s sister is wildly misinformed. Every solo makes Harley’s mind split sharp out of his body and hover smoke-like around him. The words will form and his voice will come out and he won’t remember any of it until the group has already left the stage and they’re starting to pat him on the back. 

“You’re still a kid, Harls— you’re the only sixteen year old I know who doesn’t sneak outta the house at night to smoke weed at the water hole, or drive girls home from school so you can make out in the truck bed,” Poppy says. 

“Do you even know what making out is?” Harley asks. “Who told you. I’ll punch ‘em, I really will, telling my baby sister about nasty, ungodly acts, have mercy.” 

“Why’ve you always gotta avoid the question?” says Poppy, tapping the toe of her shoe against the rim of the window. Harley has never heard her sound more like their momma. “Harley, please. I worry about you, alone all the time.”

“I’m not alone all the time. I hang out with you,” he says as he turns the truck into the parking lot of the school. The traffic is always sparse, with so few kids and so many fewer who are of age to drive. 

“I don’t count,” she says. “I’m your sister. And way younger than you to boot. Why don’t you hang out with  _ other _ people?”

“Well,” he says, and is so tired with this conversation that he snaps, “on account of no one else likes me, maybe, Pop, did you think of that?”

He tugs the gear change into park, pulls the keys from the ignition, and flicks them around his finger. 

Silence falls like a shroud made of chainmail.

Poppy reaches a hand out and brushes his shoulder. He turns to her. She looks sad. “That’s because you don’t let anyone know you, Harley,” she says.

He stares out of the windshield. Sighs. Opens the car door with an elbow and trudges out.

Instead of going right to class, Harley makes a pit stop in the bathroom. It’s empty, but he still goes to the farthest sink. Drops his backpack on the tile below it. Braces his hands on either side of the porcelain.

Stares himself down.

“Jack fucking Skellington,” he murmurs, disgusted.

He’s never let this whole not eating thing get to the point where he’s in danger of dying, or whatever. He’s somewhat careful. Usually eats once a day, when Poppy is around to see it. It isn’t like he gets hungry anymore. And no one could ever hiss behind his back about him being too big. The one good thing out of it. 

But he was never on the lookout for consequences like these. The wasting, the waning, he’s a crescent moon clinging limply to the black sheet of night. (Too far. Maybe this has gone too far.) This is what Poppy avoided saying. That no one would want to be friends with a kid who looks like the influenza victims in the history textbook. (Not nearly far enough.)

Harley spends the rest of the day in a sort of floating suspension that is becoming far too familiar. He thinks it’s the only thing he can rely on anymore.

—

Harley dreams of ashes, a desert of them, and the stench of burnt skin. Of bloody handprints on white tile walls, and the glint of metal in the dark. Of poison tracing dastardly stripes down his throat, a pit simmering in his stomach, enough to burn through granite, through concrete.  _ You’re so good for Momma.  _ Of moths turned into scarab beetles, catching the hot sunlight on their black backs, the crunch of them, the whispered click of imminent downfall, premonitions like Beethoven with his eyes closed.  _ I could just— kill you today.  _ Of water towers tipping over and spitting up mouthfuls of liquid from his lungs, but it comes out red like paint water, like he’s got tubes of watercolors for lungs and the pressure, they’re crushing— he can’t, he can’t breathe. It’s too much. 

—

Harley is barely seventeen when he swallows a handful of white pills in the dead of night. He heaves, he pukes, he doesn’t cry, he blacks out on the tile floor of his bathroom. His phone alarm goes off at five-forty-five. Wakes him. 

He gets up, washes his face, and goes to school. 

—

“Did you know goats have accents?” Harley says, twirling a pencil on the tip of his finger. 

_ “I do now,”  _ Tony says.  _ “I think that’s something only someone from the boonies would know.” _

“Checks out,” Harley agrees. He has run out of things to say already. He does not know why he called Tony. 

_ “Kid,”  _ Tony says.

“Yeah,” says Harley. 

_ “What’s up?”  _ Tony says.

“Not much,” Harley says.

_ “Is everything— good? You’re good, school is good?” _

“It’s— fine.”

_ “Fine?” _

“I—” Harley says. “It’s like every day we hurtle a fraction of a centimeter closer to the sun and I’m sitting there learning about Alexander Hamilton and the Virginia Plan and Paul Revere on his fuckin’ horse for the fourth time, and what good is that gonna do me, because not even Lin Manuel Miranda can stop imminent solar explosion which will consequently destroy most of our universe, and none of this will have even mattered, because not even God will be remembered, then, and I’m just sitting there doodling Cassiopeia in the margins.” These are not the right words. They are the ones that come, however.

_ “I see,”  _ says Tony. 

“Do you really?” Harley asks.

_ “No, I must say I do not. I am actually— very confused,”  _ says Tony. 

Harley is tired.

_ “So it’s… help me out, kid. It’s, what, boring?” _

“Yes,” Harley says. He scratches at his wrist. “No. If that was the only issue, it would be okay, it wouldn’t be that bad. But, uh. It’s, like, futile. I’m not learning anything enriching; it’s not making my life any better. Which means there’s no point.”

_ “So school isn’t engaging enough, that’s what you’re saying right now,”  _ Tony tries.  _ “Which makes going to school in Rose Hill not worth it. Because your big brain isn’t being fed.” _

Harley can think of eight snippy ways to respond to that. He goes with, “uh, yeah, pretty much,” even though it’s a lie.

Tony scratches his beard. There is a softness in his eyes that feels unfamiliar. Affection, helping Harley solve problems, these things come awkwardly, unnaturally to Tony. He tries. Especially as the years have gone on. But he never had a model for it, no one to imitate, to have felt this sort of care from.

Harley hasn’t, either, so they’re sort of in it together.

_ “I need to be sure I’m understanding before I propose something crazy and inspired and brilliant to you,”  _ Tony says, _ “because you need to react the right way or I— don’t know what I’ll do with myself. Die of mortification, possibly.” _

“You need to have self-esteem in order to be embarrassed. You don’t have that.”

_ “That is an astute observation. I do believe I am the worst, yes.” _

Harley rubs the pad of his thumb over the raised tendons on the inside of his wrist. His fingertips are trembling. He isn’t sure why. 

“I… am not being challenged in the right ways here,” Harley says slowly, carefully. He’s not really lying, this way. He is being fucking challenged, alright, but not by school. Not by the things that should challenge him. Instead he fights the tile floor of his bathroom as it hurtles towards his face. He fights the pair of fingers shoved down his throat, the way he stares at the boy behind the jam stand at the farmer’s market, the pencil-calluses that are going soft and smooth now that he can’t write, can’t draw, has nothing left to filter out of him, he is a wardrobe coated corner-to-corner with dust, he is the second between lightning and thunder, he is a page once all the words have been erased.

_ “Then move here,”  _ Tony says, and Harley’s heart drops straight into his feet. 

“What?”

_ “You heard me, kid. Move to New York. You can live in the tower with Pepper and me, we’ve got plenty of rooms now that everyone and their toaster is a fuckin’ war criminal— there’s this science and tech school near the tower, for high IQ little twerps like yourself, I know a kid that goes there, he’s a genius— actually, you’d love him, this is my best idea ever. You should just  _ move here _. You can go home to visit your sister whenever you want, whatever, you’ve got it. I have private jets, I could fucking— carry you to Tennessee via Iron Man Airlines, I could make a sidecar, fly you around like Hagrid on Sirius’s motorcycle. Easy. I can give you the kid’s number if you want to talk with him— Peter. His name is Peter, he’s a dork, he needs to be protected from the evils of the world—” _

“I’ll come,” Harley says, fast, still impulsive, always teetering on the ledge and finally, finally jumping. It was all leading to this. He’s forced himself into his own nightmare, full circle, poetic justice. Running away. “Yeah, New York. New school, new people, new— everything. Yeah. That’ll be good. Distance.” New air. Maybe it’ll clean him out on the inside, it’ll be the thing he needs to fix himself, fix everything. Find some sense of sanity in the crossroads.  _ Selfish, selfish, selfish. _

_ “That was easy,” _ says Tony, blinking. _ “Should I be concerned? You being bullied or something, trying to, to escape it? Because if that’s the issue—” _ Tony’s voice goes hard,  _ “kid, if that’s the issue, I don’t want you uprooting your life for it. Don’t you still have your piñata for a cricket?” _

“Of course I still have— that’s not the problem,” Harley says. “Just can’t, can't be here. Need something more,” his tongue feels numb, “for… to be better.” The words are wrong. Sour. Like orange pith clinging to his tongue.

Tony is silent.  _ “You good, kid?” _ he asks. And it’s not that Tony doesn’t always ask, but this time it hits Harley like a sledgehammer to the chest because everything fucking sucks and he’s still sitting here on the phone wiping stupid warm tears off his cheekbones, and he’s terrified, he’s absolutely terrified down to his atoms, they shiver and clench and ache. He fumbles the phone off the tabletop and says, “call my mom. Talk to you soon.” He hangs up. 

He buries his face between his knees and shakes apart until Poppy hammers on the garage door to tell him she’s hungry for dinner. 

—

“Hey, Momma?” Harley says. She’s at the kitchen counter, knees crossed, reading some sort of paperwork. The lightbulb above her blinks erratically.

She looks up. “Yeah, Harley?” she says. 

“Can I talk to you for a second?” he says. 

She puts the papers down. “Sure thing,” she says. “Here, let’s—” she stands and rubs her palms over her thighs. The papers are left on the counter and she leads the way into the living room, sits him on the couch beside her. “What’s up?” she says, taking his hands in hers. 

“Um,” says Harley. He takes a steeling breath. “I’m really worrying about something and I need to— put it out here, in the open, before I— before I go, because it can’t go unaddressed. And I hope you’re not— offended by it, it’s just, y’know. We’ve all had a rough go of it,” he looks away, “it’s been hard for us to find balance.”

Momma sits up straighter, turning to face Harley directly, a knee bent in front of her. The bell bottoms of her jeans splay over his knee. 

“I,” Harley says. “I’ve been doing a lot for Poppy— and, Christ, that ain’t a complaint, I love her like crazy, really, I do, but I’m worried about her. When I leave. If you’ll be able to— be here for her when she needs someone.” 

Understanding pinches his momma’s face. “You don’t trust me to take care of her alone,” she says. 

Harley says, “I think you could, if you make room for her. But you— haven’t.”

“Have you always felt like this?” Momma asks. 

“I’m sorry,” Harley says. 

Momma blows out a long breath, blinking. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you for telling me.” She gasps a little. “I’ll have my eyes open for it now, try and— make time—”

“I think it’s good that I’ll be gone,” Harley blurts, “because you won’t have to worry about paying for me anymore, maybe you can take less shifts and really have the time, a chance to get close with Poppy.” 

Momma says, “do you think we’re close— you and me?”

Harley says,  _ “Momma.” _

She says, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve asked.” She blots under her eyes with her sleeve. The knit of her sweater turns a darker blue where it gets damp. “Gosh,” she says, “I’ve really failed you, haven’t I?”

“No,” Harley says,  _ “no,  _ it’s just that things didn’t work so well the way we were— stuck in them before. But now, now you have a chance to have better.”

“I wish you didn’t feel like you have to leave,” Momma says. “I wish we coulda worked this out sooner.”

Harley says, “I wish we coulda, too.”

“You’re happy to go, though?” Momma says. “Promise me you’re not doing this because you feel pressured to by Tony, or— me.”

“I promise,” Harley says. The only weight on the decision is his own, lilting and boneless. 

Momma pulls one of her hands out of Harley’s to brush his hair out of his eyes. She blows out a sigh through pursed lips. “When did you get so big,” she whispers. “So grown.” Her thumb drops to brush the bags under Harley’s eyes. “So weary.” 

“Dunno,” he says. 

She pulls his head into her neck, hands looping around his back. He shifts to make himself comfortable, settles. Lets her hold him. 

“I won’t let you down,” she swears under her breath. “I won’t.”

Harley wishes he could believe her. 

—

Harley once painted a sunset so visceral, so layered and nuanced and vibrant, that he wedged the canvas into his open window and left it there. It was something to look at when he didn’t want to live in the real world. 

He gives it to his sister when he moves to New York City. 

—

He flies into the lot at the Avengers Compound on a plane Tony sent to pick him up, personally. It’s big and white and quiet and cold, and Harley spends the whole flight rereading the third Harry Potter book to glean a semblance of comfort from it. He awfully likes that Sirius Black. The books with his character in them are his favorites, even if Harry is depressed the whole damn time and no one notices. 

Tony is waiting on the tarmac for him, the November chill prompting him to bundle up in a puffer coat and knit hat, the coat zipped to his throat and the hat pulled low over his eyes, covering his ears. Harley has a single large suitcase, his two guitars, and his backpack, the latter of which is stuffed with the books he simply cannot go without until the rest of his shit flies in over the weekend. They’d decided he would take the necessities first, and then call back for whatever else he wants to have around. Tony was abundantly vocal as to the fact that Harley will have everything he could possibly need while living in New York, but he was also insistent that Harley not desert his life entirely. Harley’s unsure how this makes him feel.

Tony’s arms go straight out where he waits. 

Harley hightails it down the stairs and onto the concrete, drops his bags and guitar cases, and scrambles into Tony’s expectant embrace. He’s warm and he doesn’t smell like whiskey anymore. His greying beard is scratchy where he lays his cheek atop Harley’s head. They rock side to side slightly, and Tony says, “hey, champ,” in this husky little voice. 

“Hi,” Harley says, just as small. “You got old.”

“You got rude,” Tony says, and he pulls away just enough to hold Harley’s biceps in his hands and stare at him. “And tired,” he says. 

“What can I say,” Harley says, painting on a mischievous grin like gingerly pressing his face into plaster, this mold is familiar, he is the Laurence Olivier of their time, “the constant threat of imminent heat death at the hands of climate change will do that to a kid.”

“Hm,” Tony says, and squints at Harley as if reading his code, charting zeroes and ones. 

Harley’s eyes widen a little. 

“Alright,” Tony says, and Harley breathes. “C’mon, squirt, I’ve got a whole  _ host _ of very important things to catch you up on while we drive into the city.” 

These things include, it turns out: his and Pepper’s engagement, the return of Bruce Banner (!!) to Earth from what used to be Asgard, the apparent delicate humor with which to treat orphan-one-and-a-half-times-over Peter Parker- who will be waiting for them at the tower when they return and sleeping over that night, as his nurse Aunt, who is his guardian, takes only the shit shifts, which sounds awfully familiar if you ask Harley- not to call Happy Hogan  _ Forehead of Security  _ anymore as he’s moved onto higher ground at Stark Industries. Tony talks about the new hero on the block, a guy named Spider-Man with whom he’s been working for about a year now, saying he  _ tries to stick— ha!! Oh, I’m funny. What was I saying? Right, right. He tries to stick to Queens, but he’s sorta bad at listening to directions so he ends up all over the place depending on his immature whims. _ Harley thinks it’s funny Tony would talk about a grown man like that, but Tony has a habit of collecting people and assuming full responsibility for their safety. Case in point: Harley sitting criss-cross in the passenger seat of a ferociously red Audi,  _ The Prisoner of Azkaban _ open on his knee, sipping green tea out of a paper cup from Tim Hortons. 

“Tell me more about your life though, kid,” Tony says. “I know we talk, but, like, you don’t talk.”

“I talk,” Harley says. 

“Barely,” Tony says. “When you were younger you’d take an hour to get to the end of a story. I’m not exaggerating. So long. The Holden Caulfield of twelve year olds. Now you’re one of those kids who just says  _ good _ when their parent asks how school was.”

“How would you know anything about being a parent, huh?” Harley says, and Tony’s cheeks go ruddy. 

“Pete hangs out at the tower a lot,” he mumbles, and Harley forces the slight twinge of amusement in the pit of his gut to come out as an emboldened laugh. 

“Aw, that’s fucking cute,” Harley says, leaning his head against the window. His eyes fall shut. He listens to the whistle of air whipping around the glass, the hum of the engine. “Poor aunt, though, getting cradle-knapped.”

“We’ve actually got a— little co-parenting thing going on,” Tony says. “Yes, it’s cute, and disgusting, and I’m done talking about it.” 

“Fine,” Harley says, and the silence hangs for a moment. It’s not uncomfortable, but one thing Harley knows for certain is that Tony can’t handle a silence for shit. 

“How’s your sister taking the move?” Tony asks. 

“She’s…” Harley says. He yawns. He clamps a hand around the pink plastic watch on his wrist. “Surprisingly supportive. She thinks it’ll be good for me.”

“Putting yourself out there,” Tony agrees. “This will definitely get you on the radar for colleges. Scouts are always going to events at this place. Science Fairs, Geography Bees, the Academic Decathlon— it’s nerd heaven.”

“Mm,” Harley says. 

Tony’s voice lowers just slightly. “There’s choirs and stuff, too— I asked Peter about it. He doesn’t know much, but his friend Scary Michelle does the stage crew for the musicals, and she seems to like it. Well, Pete’s word was  _ tolerate _ but that’s  _ enjoy _ in Michelle Language. You’ll see soon enough.”

“Mm,” Harley says. 

“This will be good for you,” Tony continues even more quietly. “You’ll find your place, kiddo, I  _ promise.” _

Harley is asleep. 

He stays out until they pull into the Holland Tunnel and the color of the world goes suddenly, violently yellowish. 

He jumps a little, his head springing up, blinking away his disorientation. 

“Morning, Aurora,” says Tony. 

“Mm,” Harley grunts, pulling his glasses off to rub his eyes. 

“Good nap?” Tony asks. Someone honks at him and he swears. 

“Yeah,” Harley says. “Sorry for leaving you alone. How long was I out?”

“Hmm,” Tony says. “Well, we went through a bit of upstate, the lion’s share of Pennsylvania, and some of Jersey— which, truly, I’m amazed the smell alone of that pit didn’t wake you up. My guess is three hours? Ish?”

“Three hours,” Harley repeats. That’s more than he gets some nights. “That’s— hmm, that’s the most states I’ve ever been in.”

Tony snorts. “We’ll make the drive back to the Compound sometime when you aren’t ready to conk out, and then you can really enjoy it. It’s nice in October— all the leaves turn orange and it’s like driving through the fake greenery section of Hobby Lobby.” 

“Cool,” says Harley. 

Tony flicks the radio on. They listen to sixties rock at a low volume. 

“You excited?” Tony says once they’ve exited the tunnel. 

Harley’s too busy gaping to answer. He presses his face to the window, watching the way the late afternoon sun hits the glass and chrome that cuts the sky into ribbons, the refracted shards of pink and yellow light throwing the streets into vibrant disarray. The noise is deafening, it’s spectacular, the honking and talking and the rumble of trains, birds shouting and buskers on the corners and kids hollering in their parent’s ears. Languages of all sorts, from all places, New York is immediately and irrevocably a crucible, a pot of reused candle wax molded into something new to burn. 

“Jesus fuck,” Harley breathes. 

“Ah-ah-ah— mouth,” Tony says. 

Harley pulls his gaze from the window to give Tony an unimpressed look over his shoulder. 

Tony shrugs. “I’m trying that whole  _ being responsible _ thing. Lemme know how it works.”

“Okay, hot shot,” Harley says. He goes back to looking out the window. 

The ride to the tower isn’t long after that. They pull into a hidden garage and end up in a wide space housing about a dozen brightly colored cars and one beige Honda Odyssey. 

“I use that one to pick Pete up from school,” Tony explains. 

“Soccer mom.”

“Precisely the idea.”

Tony takes his guitar cases and Harley winces under the weight of his backpack and his suitcase, but they make it to the elevator. It’s sleek glass, like the sort of thing in futuristic dystopian movies, and Harley watches floor after floor blur past him, hallways full of conference rooms and levels just for storage and a few silvery areas he thinks must be labs. The numbers by the doorway climb, holographic and crisply blue, and once they hit ninety, the elevator stops, the inside overwhelmingly bright white even through the opacity of the glass. They bob for a moment before the doors open, and Harley’s vision comes into focus. It’s a living room, enormously wide and deep, with shiny whitish hardwood floors and deep brown cabinetry, dark leather couches and accents in white and maroon. A kitchen is visible through a half-wall, just as bright with sunlight as the sitting area, and a dining table stretches long enough to seat all of King Arthur’s knights side by side. 

They take a synchronized step off the elevator and the doors close smoothly behind them, plummeting downwards to carry someone else skyward.

“Chez Stark,” Tony says, and gestures with a shoulder. 

_ “Boss,” _ says a female voice. Harley jumps and looks around for its origin.  _ “Mister Parker says he’ll be up in ten minutes— he is packing away the last of the salicylic acid now.”  _

“Uh,” says Harley. 

“Oh, right,” says Tony. “That’s FRIDAY, my current AI.” 

_ “Good evening, Mister Keener.” _

“You can call me Harley, ma’am,” Harley says. Then he frowns. “What happened to Jay?”

“Remember the Ultron debacle?” says Tony.

_ “Ultron was JARVIS?” _ Harley says, gaping.

“Oh, my god, no,” Tony says. “Ultron— well, long story short, he mangled Jay’s code pretty bad and we preserved it by implanting it into what became The Vision using Helen Cho’s regeneration cradle.”

This is where Harley knows he should drop his bags in complete surprise, overjoyed, and ask approximately a million questions as to how the cradle managed to knit what he assumed was The Vision’s inhuman flesh- perhaps it was carbon-based synthetic? Embroidered with some sort of nanotech to give it the malleability and functionality of skin?- with the technological hard drive JARVIS’s consciousness would be stored on, like a brain transplant but having to build the transplantee’s body from scratch, and does The Vision have the same bodily systems as organic humans, does he have a  _ nervous system, _ can he  _ feel pain? _

Harley, instead, finds himself saying, “oh, rad.”

Tony says, “that— reaction was disappointing.”

Harley thinks,  _ I know, I know, I know. _ “Just tired, I guess. Sorry.”

“You slept three hours and you’re still tired?” Tony squints, putting the guitars on the floor. He steps forward and unknits the handle of Harley’s suitcase from his white-knuckled grasp, slips his hands under each shoulder strap of his backpack and removes the weight. The bag thuds when he sets it down, even with his caution. “Are you— sick or something? Germs? In my penthouse?”

“Nah,” Harley says as Tony presses the warm back of his hand against his forehead. “I’m fine.”

“No fever, at least,” Tony mumbles. 

_ “I could have told you that, boss,” _ says FRIDAY.

“I’m capable of feeling a forehead properly, don’t be rude,” says Tony.

_ “Whatever helps you sleep at night,”  _ says FRIDAY.

“Do you purposely choose assholes to be the people you’re close to?” Harley asks. “All of your friends are jerks to you.”

“Especially you,” Tony says, squinting, and the stifling moment of concern is over like that. “C’mon, I’ll show you your room before Terrible Two gets here.”

The hallway, which is a single straight line down to a double-doored end that Harley assumes is Tony’s and Pepper’s master suite, is a direct offshoot from the living room. Harley’s door is on the right, towards the middle. Across from Harley’s door is a single other one, with one of those old timey license plates labeled  _ Peter. _

Tony pushes Harley’s door open.

The inside is like something Harley would have dreamt of but never would have been able to put into words; it’s a Pinterest incarnation alive. The wall behind his crisply linened bed is lined with white brick, bright in the fierce sun streaming through a pillow-padded bay window. Another wall has a narrow floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on either end and an enormous navy blue tapestry with constellation details strung up in between, a wooden desk facing it, and Harley likes the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is staring into the wide expanse of the heavens. The doors to the closet are closed, light wood with a full length mirror on one door. One corner is taken by an amalgam of soft beanbags and pillows and blankets— a reading nook. There are plants on every flat surface, NASA print-outs and Indiana Jones posters and a painting easel in the corner. Everything Harley could have ever mentioned to Tony that might have given him an idea of the things he enjoys, it’s here. 

“Tony,” Harley breathes, putting his bags down and stepping into the middle of the room like he’s on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or something. “It’s awesome.” He puts his arms out and spins a little, and feels some niggling warmth in his stomach when he looks at Tony, who looks mortified and incredibly pleased at once. 

“S’nothing,” Tony says with a shrug. “If you click the remote on that desk, a TV will come out of that panel on the ceiling. The video game controllers and shit are in a big box under the bed. Organized by— theme. You can move anything, whatever, this was just, y’know, a temporary set-up for you to fix to your little childish liking once you got here—”

“Tony.”

“A laptop, a new tablet, and a new phone are under there with the games, by the way. Yours are old models, the cameras are finicky and we can’t have that, can we, so, uh, these ones are better and I swear I didn’t put spy software on them, your privacy is yours—”

_ “Tony.” _

Harley walks over to the man and nudges his shoulder. “Thanks. Really.”

Tony nods a little, his lips quirking. He looks down, then back at Harley. “If there’s anything else you need, or want, or whatever— let me know?”

Harley nods, but he can’t foresee Tony having overlooked anything.

“I’ll give you a minute to settle in before Pete gets here,” Tony says. He points towards a doorway beside the closet. “Full ensuite,” Tony says, and Harley grins. 

“Thanks,” Harley says one more time, because this is really cool. It is. 

Tony winks, then leaves.

Harley allows the grin to fall. He shoves his guitar cases under the bed, hangs his backpack off the desk chair, and moves his suitcase near the closet. 

He goes into the bathroom. It is fully stocked with everything he could need. Thick towels hang off racks and there’s already a toothbrush standing in a porcelain holder on the counter. The mirror is wide enough to fit five Harleys shoulder-to-shoulder. He’s pretty sure— he’s relatively certain, actually, that the floor tiles are heated. Ridiculous. Absolute opulence, and Harley wants to  _ deck Tony. _ And then hug him. And then push him one more time.

“Miss FRIDAY?” says Harley. 

_ “Yes, Harley?” _

“Is that toilet seat heated?”

_ “Yes, Harley.” _

“Ah,” he says, nodding. “Yes, because that is reasonable and not at all overboard, not at all, when the world is balls deep in climate crisis and— I certainly don’t need a heater for my ass. I take quick poops. And— fucking hell, is that—? I’ve never even seen a bidet and now I’m gonna have to clean my ass on one, aren’t I. I’m, yes, I am, for science, it’s an experiment.”

_ “Should I tell boss you’re enjoying your exploration?” _

“Ask him why he’s wasting electricity on me.”

_ “The entire Stark Tower is actually powered using arc reactor technology, which has significantly lower—” _

“Carbon emissions,” Harley interrupts, “wow. Didn’t know that. Why hasn’t he wired the whole— country on arc reactor tech yet, huh? Sounds like somethin’ he’d do.”

_ “Boss has presented such plans to the United States Congress on several occasions, but has been unsuccessful each time due to the—” _

“Right-leaning majority, fuck,” Harley says. 

_ “You interrupt me even more than the boss does,” _ FRIDAY observes.

“Sorry,” Harley says. “Bad habit. Very bad at breaking it.”

FRIDAY is quiet for a moment.  _ “I was joking, Harley. I don’t mind it.” _

“Oh,” Harley says. He clears his throat.

Suddenly drained, Harley decides to freshen up a bit before finally meeting this Peter kid. He splashes water on his face, drags his wet fingers through his hair. He’s got a Shawn Hunter middle part thing going on now. It’s like being Leonardo DiCaprio, only he’d survive until the end of  _ Titanic _ because he’s small enough to fit on any floating piece of driftwood and bony enough that it wouldn’t so much as tilt the wrong way. 

Harley snorts at his own joke. Sure. That’s why he doesn’t eat. Self preservation.

When he starts heading back towards the living room, he hears Peter already there. His voice is sort of reedy and soft, excitedly waxing about how “the incorporation of the black-tinted nanites is a good idea but maybe  _ maybe _ we might be able to get some sort of advanced stealth tech— the, uh—”

“Retroreflective panels?” Harley says.

Two heads snap up towards him, and Harley feels like he’s been smacked. 

Peter is a mini-Tony upon first glance: small-nosed and messy, curly-headed and sharp-eyed. The difference is clear, though: where they’re both short and lithely muscled, Peter’s shoulders are broader; Peter’s eyes are smaller and lighter brown; Peter is wearing a frayed-edged flannel shirt underneath a pullover sweatshirt and jeans that are cuffed heavily at the ankle while Tony is wearing a pair of grey cotton sweatpants and a hoodie that probably belongs to Pepper because it’s pale pink and far too long for him. 

Peter’s face breaks into a careful smile. He stands taller, brushes his hands together, then waves, polite nearly ad nauseam, like Harley's worst genteel nightmare.

“It’s nice to meet you, finally,” the kid says, putting a hand out to shake. Harley takes it. “Mister Stark talks about you all the time.”

Harley feels his eyebrows go up. “He does?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Peter, and he shoves his hands into his back pockets, rocks on his heels. “Seems like there’s a lot to brag about when it comes to you.”

Harley doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he settles for pressing his lips together in a weak attempt at a smile.

“Hey,” Peter says, as if gaining momentum. “You’re enrolled at Midtown, right?” He doesn’t wait for Harley to respond. “Awesome. I’ll totally show you around if you want. It’s sort of stupidly set up, like the classroom numbers are not consequential at all, and, uh, the whole thing sort of loops weirdly? And it’s three floors, which is annoying, but— I’m sure you’ll get it!” Peter hurries to reassure. His cheeks go slightly pink. Which is endearing, Harley guesses. “Like, you’ll be fine, but I figure it’ll probably be helpful for you to have— help. The first few days. I’m awkward, sorry.”

Harley paints a grin on. Tilts his head just slightly to the right, makes sure the corners of his eyes wrinkle. “Thank you,” he says. “I’d appreciate that.” 

Peter smiles back and waves a hand noncommittally. “S’no problem.”

Tony taps Harley on the shoulder. “Was just about to ask Pete about dinner plans,” he says, “but the newbie should have the honors. Any special requests on your part?”

“Nah, whatever works,” he says, stomach sinking. 

Tony says, “hm,” and squints. 

Harley says, “let Peter choose, he— knows better than me.”

Tony says, “alright, fair enough. Pete, we can order Chinese, Thai, both?” 

“Both is good,” says Peter. 

Harley turns towards him. He says, “Have you ever seen that  _ really _ old movie, The Road to El Dorado?” 

The temperature of the air in the room seems to have suddenly warmed; the density, lessened. Like scraping a pair of scissors down a length of ribbon, the polite grace melts out of Peter at once, and he’s left loose and slouched and lanky. 

Tony whispers, “oh, no, I’ve created a monster.”

Peter’s jaw drops loose. His eyes shine. “I think—” He breaks off, clears his throat. “It turns out I’ve just met my soulmate.”

—

Coming to learn Peter is like observing a benign compound, then breaking it down into its elements to find it’s made of silly putty, C-4, a single chocolate Ding-Dong from two-thousand-and-six, and glitter glue, shaped into a humanoid clay vase, then laced into a pair of scuffed Nike skate shoes. 

Peter listens to a near-constant stream of Daniel Caesar, who Harley had never listened to before but now simply cannot get enough of. Peter professes to love Star Wars, but admits to Harley that he’s always preferred Star Trek and only watched the former in order to have something with which to relate to Ned, who has been his best friend since they both couldn’t find a seat at lunch in the fourth grade. Peter knows how to cook because his Aunt May does not. Peter, though he excels at engineering, prefers chemistry. Peter uses disposable cameras, gets the film developed, and hangs the pictures on his bedroom walls, which is papered nearly top to bottom with blurry, hypercolored images of May, Tony, Ned, another friend named Michelle, and someone Harley assumes is the late Uncle, based on the familiar curly brown hair and broad shoulders and sticky-outy ears. Peter pets every stray dog they pass on the street, and would cut his heart out with a butter knife and wield it on a platter for anyone who looks like they might need it.

It’s not that he’s constantly a sunshine child unbothered by the stresses of life or anything— he tends to slip somewhere deep inside himself during class lectures or quiet stretches between conversations, and, though he comes back with a bump from Harley’s elbow or a whisper of his name from Ned, it’s clear he’s got something stirring under his skin. He bounces his knees constantly, and his hands tremble, and he seems to be bothered by intense light and sound, claiming migraines. 

Peter gets pissed when he sees assholes bullying people, and he’ll clench his jaw and ball a fist and tell whoever the jerk is to shut up, and he’ll still wear that tension in his shoulders like a coat hanger when he goes up to the kid who was being taunted and asks if they’re alright, to the point that even Harley feels on edge when he sees it; he’s sure that Peter has the full ability to be fucking terrifying if he so wished to be. He’s so unreservedly intelligent that his gaze borderlines on abrasive, bruising. He struggles to pay attention for long stretches of time. He pulls on his hair to stay awake in class, but falls asleep anyway. He’s flaky, and defensive, and clingy. He’s disorganized, stubborn, strong-willed, and  _ graciously imperfect. _ Harley is relieved by it. It makes Peter human, no matter how proper he’d seemed at first greeting. 

Peter’s the type of person who’s a sledgehammer without knowing it. Every boundary Harley has ever upheld, every bit of distance he’s shoved between himself and his peers, Peter takes one look at and then leaps over gracelessly, shattering glass into a rainbow of shards and knocking over walls with no regard, wholehearted and clumsy. While Harley has tended to avoid his own desperately tactile inclinations with everyone other than his sister, Peter wrangles soft touches out of him with a wide grin and a half-hug when they meet up at school, a hand steadying his waist on the subway when they’re on the way to the tower, a foot wedged under his thighs while they watch a movie. Seemingly subconsciously, Peter will pick up one of Harley’s hands and fiddle with it, examining the knuckles and tracing the lines of the palm without reason. It’s as if Peter absorbs those around him, turns them into an extension of his own body. 

And now Harley finds himself doing it, too: looping their arms together, a weight as they walk through school hallways; grabbing a fistful of his hood as they tear down the streets, chasing a train they’re too late for; dropping his forehead against Peter’s forearm where it lies on the lunch table when it all becomes too much. 

A tired, lonely part of Harley feels immense relief, having this. A part of him he hadn’t known was starving feels satisfied. 

They get coffee together. Tony invites them into the lab as a pair, and they toss ideas back and forth for Iron Man’s intended new armor, made entirely of nanites, which is an idea so wildly brilliant that Harley thinks about it almost constantly. 

Peter takes him to the Central Park Zoo, and Tony takes him bowling with Pepper, and he meets Peter’s Aunt May, who tries to cook for him and fails spectacularly, to Harley’s relief. He sits with Ned and Michelle at lunch hour. Listens to them talk about Academic Decathlon, tests them, flicking through their flashcards. Stares at the advertisements for the spring musical, rolling the idea around in his mind.

Weeks pass, then a month. Harley paints on smiles, and chokes out laughs, and places an immediate and strict prohibition upon indulgence. In the evenings, he does his homework. He eats a partial serving of whatever Tony puts on the table. He takes a shower. He climbs in bed. He does not sleep all that much. It isn’t nightmares that keep him awake— they are few and far between, and he almost never remembers them by the time he wakes up. It’s a bone-deep something that wars with his exhaustion. A weight closes his eyes, heavies his limbs, lays him down flat. But unconsciousness refuses to come, a tide receding off the shore and exposing the hard-shelled life of the shallows. 

He’s been awake for over forty hours at this point, and he’s on the verge of tears. His face is smashed into his pillow, he’s wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, he drank caffeine-free peppermint tea before bed. He took thirty milligrams of Melatonin and it’s doing nothing but making him sonorous and sullen. He is an anthology of empty pages, a shipwreck turned green at the bottom of the sea, the plastic wrapping torn off of a fresh notebook.

He grabs his phone. 

**peachy keener** (1:04)

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YFXTQ9hCXk ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YFXTQ9hCXk) i’m so mad at how good “blessed” is. it’s stuck in my head.

also maybe MAYBE just maybe it made me think of u a lil bit uwu

**petey parallel parker** (1:05)

art!!!!! chefs kiss!!!! The Flavor!!!

dhhJFJHUINRCNEWRC i just read the rest of that

attachment: right_in_the_honey_nut_feelios.jpeg

**peachy keener** (1:05)

pretty illegal of u to be actually awake with ur human body at this time

**petey parallel parker** (1:06)

um?????? madame, might i bring to ur attention ur awakeness

**peachy keener** (1:08)

no; that, too, is illegal

**petey parallel parker** (1:09)

that semicolon is my sleep paralysis demon

**peachy keener** (1:11)

attachment: singing_mamma_mia_unintelligibily_buzzfeed_unsolved.jpg

**petey parallel parker** (1:12)

you have way too many specific reaction memes, it’s worrying

**peachy keener** (1:13)

attachment: shrek_with_knife.jpeg

goto sleep, heathen

**petey parallel parker** (1:25)

attachment: no_u_reverse_uno_card.jpeg

**peachy keener** (1:25)

did u fall asleep and then wake urself up out of spite to have stayed up longer than me

**petey parallel parker** (1:26)

no 

i did it so u wouldn’t be lonely!! :D

**peachy keener** (1:26)

attachment: angry_emoji_mixed_with_blowing_kiss_emoji.jpeg

**petey parallel parker** (1:27)

attachment: penguin_with_hearts.jpeg

go to sleep, u cow turd

**peachy keener** (1:28)

ur simultaneously so nice and so heartbreakingly rude. the duality of man.

the duality of babey*

okay gn stinker get good zzz’s

**petey parallel parker** (1:29)

mwah sleep well spaghetti western 

*tips cowboy hat* m’harley 

mkay im done now

Harley puts his phone down. Closes his eyes. Still cannot sleep, but drifts until the sun burns his eyes. 

—

“Harley,” Peter says with a frown, bumping him in the bicep with a pointy elbow, the drone of the boisterous cafeteria humming around them, “aren’t you gonna get lunch?” 

This is a repeated phrase with them. Peter does not drop it.

“Not hungry,” Harley says, trying to keep his cheeks from going red. “You know I never am.”

“I have extra food if you want,” Peter presses.

“Eat shit,” Harley says.

“Immature,” Peter says with a sniff, dunking a dinosaur nugget into honey mustard. He pops it into his mouth, then reaches under the lunch table and nabs a plastic bag from his backpack. “Go’ matzoh if ‘oo change ‘oor mind,” he says through half-chewed nugget.

“You are— disgusting,” Harley says. He looks at the bag and says, “oh my god  _ what _ those are  _ enormous _ what the fuck is  _ that.” _

“Matzoh,” Peter repeats proudly. 

“What’s a mazzah?” Harley says. 

“Matzoh,” Peter says a third time, then spells it. “Jewish unleavened bread, dude. It’s, like, eighty percent of my diet, and more than that during Passover.”

“I,” Harley says. He squints. “Literally didn’t even know you’re Jewish.” 

“Ey,” Peter says, then, “oy vey. Kvetch. Schlep. Mazel tov. _ L’chaim, to life.”  _ Peter slips into an overly deep timbre and splays his arms, palms pointed upwards.  _ “Shema Yisrael A-do-nai Elo-hay-nu A-do-nai Echad,” _ he chants, and Harley, Ned, and Michelle hush him and slap at his shoulders through their giggles, desperate to stop him before any more people turn to stare. 

Peter scowls at them, calls them  _ dinner table antisemites,  _ and daintily removes a piece of matzoh from the bag to crunch on, crumbs tumbling onto the tabletop between his elbows. 

Harley’s laugh stops abruptly and his heart thumps staring at it. It’s fucking enormous. It looks even bigger out of the bag, in Peter’s small hands. Who would make a cracker that big. Who would  _ eat _ a cracker that big. Why did Peter need to pack  _ three of them _ for  _ one day of school.  _ Fucking— Christ, Harley’s chest burns, the spot behind his eyes, he can’t fill his lungs. 

He stands up sharply. “Bathroom,” he grinds out at Ned’s startled look and MJ’s vaguely intrigued one. 

“Harley?” Peter says, but Harley’s already a few long strides away from the table, his chair left pushed out in his wake. As he walks, his scuffed Chucks slap against the linoleum and he feels as if every gaze is traced on him, following him through the maze of tables and teens wielding laden lunch trays and the scent of pasta sauce with a shit ton of oregano burns his nose and the door seems too far away. His shoulders bunch by his ears and he gasps a little breath, looking down to hide it, the way he grapples to suck air into his chest. 

Breaking through the double doors to the cafeteria and into the hallway is like cresting the top of a mountain and seeing rolling plains and low-hanging clouds and the curve of the earth spread around him, pink-tinged and powdery. 

He books it into the nearest bathroom, stumbles into the handicapped stall, and locks the door behind him. Wholly disgusted but also wholly breathless, he collapses to his ass on the tile, shoving his head between his knees and yanking on his hair. His gasps echo between the narrow walls. Why is he like this. Why is he  _ like this,  _ freaking out over a fucking cracker he isn’t even going to eat. 

He brings his fist down hard on his thigh once, then twice, the same spot, like this will flatten the bugs crawling under his skin, like this will settle him, press him closer to the earth and make him root, like each swollen bruise is a caress from hands that held him and nursed him and sent him off into life like a bird who never learned to fly, who always stayed in the goddamn nest, his  _ wings don’t work, what kind of bird can’t fly. Useless. Fucking useless.  _

A part of him wonders, as he presses his thumb into the sore spot, what would’ve been so bad about taking it, eating it. A larger part of him insists he doesn’t need it; he’s just fine without it, that’s what’s wrong, it’s excess, it’s unnecessary, he’s good to go as is. Besides, he hasn’t done anything to deserve it. Isn’t hungry enough, hasn’t gone long enough since a meal to validate it. 

The door to the bathroom opens with a creak. 

Footsteps approach and Harley tries to hold his breath, but a whimper slips out, pitiful and small. 

A weight comes to the ground outside of his stall. He watches the black skate shoes shift, the mismatched socks below rolled denim cuffs, and when he sits with his side leaned against the door and extends a hand under the wide gap, Harley takes it. 

They sit there, Harley inside the stall and Peter outside like they’re on opposite sides of a fault line that grinds and grinds and grinds, and they breathe until it becomes easy, until the stabbing behind Harley’s eyes and the burning in his chest fade to dull aches. He feels heavy again, once it’s passed. Exhausted.

Harley slumps forward against his knees, able to peer under the door. Peter mirrors the position and meets his eyes.

Peter traces swirls and figures onto the back of Harley’s hand, and Harley tries to imagine each one is a color, that each one will leave him marked: Peter’s imprint on his skin forever, serving its purpose as a desperately understated reminder.

Peter taps a fingernail against the prominent bone on the side of Harley’s wrist, and Harley pretends it thuds like a drum. 

“I’m worried about you,” Peter whispers. His eyes are wide.

Harley’s heart drops eight stories. They’re familiar, the words, the sentiment of them. For Poppy, for his momma. For Missus Eden’s stupid cow that always eats the weed the Wright brothers plant in the edge of her garden. But those words, directed at him? Nearly unheard of. He’s the worrier, never on the other side of the worry. It’s uncomfortable, unwieldy, mortifying. 

In a moment of overwhelming weakness, Harley whispers back, “me too.”

Peter squeezes his hand like a lifeline. “Do you— do you want to come over this afternoon? We can just, like, watch Regular Show reruns and take a nap. Recoup a little.”

Harley says, “okay. Yeah. Thank you.”

Peter says, “you know I’m here for you, right?”

Harley says, “don’t make me cry, you soggy chip.”

“Then let me help you not be sad, or— let me be here for you while you’re sad! Just, like— as moral support! Then I won’t need to make soggy chip proclamations on the piss-stained tile of the second-floor bathroom.”

“Have mercy,” Harley says, and a tired almost-laugh huffs out of him. 

“Was it— did something happen, to set that off?” Peter asks. 

“Uh,” Harley says. “Not really. Just me.”

“Are you sure?” 

“Uh, yeah. Yeah.” 

“Dude, you need to work on being convincing. Seriously.”

“I’m sure,” Harley corrects with more force. Harley imagines lying to Peter is equally as painful as getting your dick caught under the treads of a cement spinner. 

The bell rings. 

Peter squeezes Harley’s hand once more before letting go. Harley pushes himself off the tile and takes a deep breath before opening the door to the stall, schooling his expression into one of sheepish appreciation. 

“Thanks again,” Harley says. 

Peter nudges him in the ribs with his elbow. “Dude. No prob.”

Harley allows himself to float for the rest of the day. He thinks he deserves it, after. 

They take the train to Jamaica station together, stop at Peter’s favorite bodega, grab a handful of bags of gummy worms and some iced tea, and then head towards Peter’s apartment building. 

The hallways are almost always full of children at this barely-after-school hour, the lower levels populated with young parents looking for cheap rent. Peter and May live on the sixth-floor. There’s no elevator, and Harley is always huffing and puffing embarrassingly by the time they reach the top, his chest tight. 

“My lungs… so shriveled, so poor…” Harley mumbles. 

Peter tosses a look at Harley. He shoves the key into the lock as he says, “it’s okay, we all have our weaknesses. Yours just happens to be stairs.”

“My Achilles heel. Damn thee, stairs, foul beasts of shadowy night,” Harley says. “The poison slipped past my lips, strangling the final breath from my chest, the last shallow beat from mine heart.”

The key clicks and the door opens. Peter holds it open and lets Harley slip past, saying, “my dear.”

Harley says, “my gracious gentleman. Deep thanks to you— to whom my life is owed.” 

Peter tosses his backpack onto the floor beneath the coat rack, a thing made of pipes with wheels on the bottom. It’s very Urban Outfitters. The whole place has accents like it: small half-dead plants and patterned rugs and shiny white mugs full of forgotten tea. Harley toes his sneakers off and slings his Anorak neatly on a hanger that has, over the weeks, become his designated one. There are four hangers: one for May’s plaid coat, one for Peter’s enormous denim jacket, one for Harley, and one for Tony. It’s nice. Makes Harley feel wanted for a moment, looking at his shit hanging beside Peter’s. 

“Hey,” Peter says quietly, grabbing Harley’s attention, and he wonders idly how long he’d been staring. 

Peter tosses a free arm around Harley’s shoulders, the plastic bag of gummy worms and tea swinging in his other hand. 

They go into Peter’s bedroom, toss themselves onto the lower level of his bunk bed shoulder to shoulder. Peter gets up after a second, grabs his laptop, turns on the string lights that wrap around his top bunk like constellations. He lights a lavender candle, wags his eyebrows, and says, “I’m setting the mood,” before plopping down in the space he’d vacated. Though he’s broader than Harley, they’re about the same length- read: short, like five-foot-seven short- so their feet are on the same level. Four different socks side by side. 

Peter opens his laptop and pulls up the Stark Streaming Service. It’s not a real thing— just for a handful of people close to Tony who have special requests for what they want to watch. Tony refused the idea of them giving money to a corporation like Netflix when he can give them the same thing for exactly zero of their dollars. Tony is ceaselessly generous like that. 

Peter queues up Regular Show, then sets the laptop at the far end of the mattress. He hands Harley his tea- black, unsweetened, which might be illegal back in Tennessee but isn’t here- opens his own, and they clink before drinking. 

They watch in silence for an episode or two, and Harley feels present as Peter’s shoulder brushes his with every breath. Peter’s laugh is a quiet puff from his nose. Peter’s sheets smell like his peppermint shampoo and the air is thick with burnt lavender from the candle. He’s here. He’s here.

Peter rips open a pack of gummy worms with his teeth after another episode. He offers Harley one first. Harley stares for a second, then shakes his head no. 

Peter says, “please. One.”

Harley says, “Pete.”

Peter says, “I’ll literally scream if you don’t take one. Like, I’ll yell so loud someone is gonna come running to make sure you haven’t— strung me up onto the wall and thrown darts at me, or, like, cut off my balls and blended them into a smoothie—“

“Jesus Christ,” Harley says and he takes one gummy worm. 

Peter grins ears to ear, his eyes crinkling at the corners. 

Harley scowls and stares at the thing in his hand. His eyes flit to Peter and back once. Spiteful and violent, he rips a bite off and chews it aggressively, the sugar sweet enough to burn his tongue.

“Thank you,” Peter whispers. 

Harley grunts. His face feels red. His stomach aches with a sort of phantom pain. He chews, and he swallows, and he hates himself for not hating it. 

For being reminded of days when he and Poppy were young and Momma would come home from work at the diner or the bar or from handling the register at the counter inside the gas station with a treat in her purse for them, an apology for never being around, and the two of them would sit on the kitchen counter while Momma sat on a stool and they’d shove sticky fingers into the bag, giggling and bumping shoulders and being young. 

For looking at the remainder of the gummy in his hand.

For wanting another bite.

Peter scoots down against the pillows and shoves his head into the junction of Harley’s neck, his hair rasping under Harley’s chin. Peter’s arms cross over his chest. Harley leans his cheek on Peter’s head.

They stay that way until May comes home with takeout ramen. Harley forces most of a bowl down and then attempts to ignore the fierce discomfort that comes with being full. 

He and Peter return to Peter’s bedroom after that, only now they watch Adventure Time and Harley is gone again, the plot insignificant, the screen a blur of color. Lost, labyrinthine in his head. Everything good is brief. He thinks he likes it better this way. It is familiar, like hiding his head under his bedsheets. Far from the world.

After a while, Harley feels Peter shift next to him. He pulls his hoodie over his head and tosses it onto his desk, grabbing a blanket from the end of his bed with which to exchange it. In a smooth motion, Peter shakes the blanket loose, then wraps it around his shoulders. Peter’s arms are pale in the half-light of early evening, and Harley sits up so quickly that the mattress bounces.

“Peter,” he says, his consciousness slammed back into his skull with enough force to make his heart hammer. “Peter.”

“What?” Peter says, confused.

“How did you— what is that? On your wrist?”

Peter lifts his arm and looks, his eyebrows beetling in recognition. “Oh,” he says. “Just a bruise.”

“Peter,” Harley says thinly, wriggling towards the end of the bed and coming hard to his feet. “How did you— how did that happen. It’s fucking— black, and green, what the fuck, Peter.” He takes the steps to Peter’s side and lifts his arm, twisting it to get a better look. 

“No— it’s, it’s nothing, really,” Peter says. His palm is sweaty against Harley’s.

_ “Nothing?” _ Harley repeats. “That’s a handprint wrapping around your wrist, these are— these are fingers here.” Harley hisses, furious, “talk to me, you dumb idiot. You stupid little man.”

Peter says, “okay, that’s taking it a little far.”

Harley drops Peter’s arm, pulse thundering against his neck. “You’re right. That was mean. I’m sorry. You’re not a dumb idiot.”

“But I’m a stupid little man?”

“Yeah.” 

Peter takes a deep breath and runs a hand through his hair. Harley watches the light catch the bruise, sending it into stark relief. An ink blot on parchment made wet, bleeding violet over the expanse of cream. 

In Harley’s gut blooms a sudden and violent need to protect, to put himself bodily between Peter and any danger that might befall him, a shield, a cover like that of night shadow, turn him invisible, impossible to be found, to be harmed. “The only other time I’ve seen a bruise like that was when I forgot to change the sheets on my bed and my pa shook me like a culturally-appropriated maraca.”

“He  _ shook _ you?” Peter says.

“What?” Harley says. He snorts derisively. “Oh. Yeah. That was— a fun one,” he says, almost nostalgically, and he tastes bile, “especially compared to the time he pushed me down the stairs. That was— definitely an interesting choice, very  _ flashback to the past of the troubled male lead who cannot make any emotional connections _ character in a Hallmark Christmas special.”

Peter says, “Harley, that’s literally abuse.”

“Nah,” says Harley, and he shakes his head. His hair flops in front of his glasses. “He didn’t even hit me that hard. I hardly ever bruised.”

“That’s still abuse!”

“Don’t tell me your parents never hit you,” Harley says. “Even if not— regularly. Once or twice, when you forgot to do your chores or whatever.”

“My parents never hit me, as far as I remember,” Peter says firmly. “Not once. Neither did May, or Ben.” 

That— feels weird. It flutters like pond nettles in the pit of Harley’s stomach, all of the spikes and none of the fluff. 

“Oh,” he says. He sits on the edge of the mattress, feet hanging over the hardwood. Peter crosses gently and sits beside him.

Harley looks at him.

Peter’s lips turn down at the corners, like he’s holding back some weighty sort of sigh. Harley’s glad he swallows it. The breadth of it would’ve scattered him, a wasted dandelion wish.

“It’s fine,” Harley says.

“Harley,” Peter says. 

“Yeah,” Harley says.

“Are you gonna— allude to this and then make my brain devour itself wondering if you’re gonna, I don’t know, explain it, or, like, in any way, intentionally or not, assure me that you’re— okay, you’re good?” says Peter. “C’mon. Sing to me, Paolo.”

Harley sings,  _ “have you ever seen such a beautiful night?” _

Peter groans deeply and drops his face into his hands.

“I’m, like, fine,” Harley says. 

“Dude,” Peter says, muffled. “That is not reassuring, like, at all.”

“Hey,” Harley says, sitting straighter. “You— prick, you derailed me, I was worrying about you and you made it about me, that’s treason.”

“To what country?” Peter says. “What?”

“Made more sense in my head,” Harley admits. “But the— point still stands, what the fuck, dude, you’ve got a  _ hand shaped bruise _ on your  _ wrist. _ Are you getting bullied or something? Is it Flash? I’ll fucking— kick his ass into kingdom come, I will—”

“It’s funny that you think I can imagine you ever touching anything with the intention to hurt it,” Peter says, finally looking up. “You’re, like, the gentlest bunny rabbit.”

Harley blinks. “I am— wildly offended, I am so scary and badass, have you ever seen my Doc Martens.”

“Yes,” says Peter, “they’re lined with sherpa. They’re brown. They’re  _ delicate forest child, _ not  _ hardened street mountebank.” _

Harley scowls. “You say all that about avoiding the question, me avoiding the question, but look at you.”

Peter shrugs with one shoulder. 

“You’re Spider-Man, aren’t you?” Harley says.

Peter says, “uh, what?”

“Oh, you’re totally Spider-Man,” says Harley. He shakes his head. “Dude. You just said May never hurt you; she’s a scary Italian lady but not— not the wooden spoon kind, right? So it isn’t domestic abuse. Plus— no offense, but now that I think about it, you don’t have the, the attitude, we’ve got a flavor, the kids who got smacked all the time, and you lack it.” Harley sniffs, then his jaw tightens. “Oh my god, I watch you kick ass on the news on the regular. The frickin’— your voice, I knew that sticky bastard sounded familiar. Couldn’t put my finger on it, though.” Harley falls flat backwards on the bed, his hair fluttering onto his forehead. The mattress bounces. “Knew Tony couldn’t emotionally handle the strain of talking to more than two young adults at once. Does May know?”

“Yeah,” Peter says morosely. “And Ned. Prob’ly Michelle, too, but it’s hard to tell if she actually knows something or if she just wants me to think she knows something.”

“She is so scary and cool,” says Harley. 

“Mph,” says Peter.

“Oh, you’re in  _ love _ with her,” says Harley.

Peter’s gaze shoots to Harley. “Can you— are you a fucking mind reader? Dude, what the hell,” he says. “What the hell,” he whispers.

Harley shrugs. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Peter’s eyebrows knit, the wonky left one spiking up onto his forehead.

“Kidding,” Harley says. He pats Peter’s back. “I was kidding, in case that went over your deliriously gullible head. You’re just very easy to read.”

Peter squints at Harley, then sighs and mirrors his position, knees bent over the edge of the mattress. “Are you gonna tease me about making a move on her, too?” he asks. “Tony does, all the time. May, too. They’re terrible together.”

“I won’t,” Harley says. “If you wanna make a move, you will. Or, she will. She’d probably prefer that, actually. Plus, we’re, like, young. There’s no rush to sack up and— procreate. Yo,” Harley’s head turns towards Peter, “do you think your spunk is radioactive? Does it, like, glow in the dark?”

“Oh, my god,” Peter says.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t tested it,” Harley says. “I would not believe for a second that Peter- Peter Parker, who would dissect a turd if I told him it came from Captain America’s adult diaper just to check how his enhancements mutated his genes- would not check if his spunk glows in the dark.”

Peter mumbles something that sounds like  _ just because I didn’t say it doesn’t mean I didn’t check. _

“Holy  _ shit,”  _ Harley says. A laugh bubbles in his stomach and pours free in something like a victorious shout. It’s loud and echoing and nostalgic like boxed brownie mix, and he claps a hand over his mouth, because he’s fucking shocked. A strange part of him almost forgot what it sounds like. 

Peter nudges an elbow into his ribs. They meet eyes. Peter grins at him, a shadow of leftover chagrin coloring his cheeks pinkish, but the grin unbearably soft. Harley wonders how he made it so long without anything like this— friends, people his age, people to make him laugh, feel safe, people who listen to the words he says when he talks and share back confidently, kindly. 

He thinks Peter sees it all on his face by the way his eyes crinkle just slightly deeper. 

Harley peels his hand from his mouth and feels he’s still smiling when it lands on his chest. He doesn’t want to stop— doesn’t think he can, not with Peter looking at him like that.

Harley has based a lot of his life around desperately needing control. And, yet. He feels he’s finally found someone to whom he can briefly entrust the reins.

—

Everything is alright for about three weeks, and then something slips. 

—

It’s fast, descent. Like rolling clumsy down a mountain face, snow and rock tumbling behind you as you lead the charge. 

Wednesday evening finds Harley with the toes of his Chucks over the lip of Stark tower, staring straight into the slowly-blinking eyes of the city, gold and disinterested. 

Harley is wondering if he’ll shatter into pieces like old pottery, like the sort of stuff he’d sculpt in art class before he stopped feeling and found his hands helpless in holding a paintbrush or a pencil or his guitar. 

Below him taxis honk and breaths are blown out into the late-November air, and Harley is a brick building smack in the middle of glass and chrome; he’s crumbling, ivy-choked, stained-grout, you can crush him underfoot. 

He’s nothing. He’s enormous, girthy and unforgivable and pumice stone scratches. He’s nothing. Within his skull a Daedalan labyrinth has been etched and not even Araidne’s damn spool could lead him out. He’s exhaustion and standing above the liminality of falling asleep. Squinting at it. Edging closer. 

There is something almost profane about Harley Keener imploding with no one there to watch.

“Kid?”

Actually. There is one person there to watch.

“Harley. Kid.”

“Hi,” Harley says. The outer metal door that leads from the elevator onto the flat expanse of the roof swings in the wind. Harley closes his eyes and listens.

“Are you gonna jump?” says Tony from behind Harley. He does not come closer. Harley thinks this is because Tony is scared. Harley remembers  _ scared _ the same way he remembers young childhood: sepia-toned and distant and stinking of his father’s cheap cologne.

Harley opens his eyes and blinks at the city, which flicks its brows back at him. A challenge. “I don’t think so,” he says, because something feels wrong, doing it with Tony here.

“Good,” Tony says, fast. “Can I come closer?”

“Okay,” Harley says, because he does not mind.

Tony’s footsteps approach, then stop. Tony’s fingertips brush the bend of Harley’s elbow. The touch is light through the cotton sleeve of his shirt.

“Harley,” Tony says. “Christ, come down for me? Please? On the flat surface, down here, next to me. Come on, kid.”

Harley wants to say  _ not yet. _ Harley wants to say _ I don’t know how. _ Harley has a hundred thousand things sitting in the rattling hollow of his skull and none of them will reach his lips.

“You— fall,” Tony says as if the word is a flechette, like it could break his teeth if he said it wrong, “I catch you, I throw you back on the roof and then duct tape you into a bubblewrap suit for the rest of time. No bail money, no shortening your sentence.”

“It’s futile,” Harley says, and Tony’s breath stutters audibly, like things have clicked into place, like he’s skimming the pages of a history textbook and has realized that  _ A _ lead to  _ B,  _ that  _ C _ is the cause of  _ D _ but  _ D _ had started far before  _ C _ had even been recognized.

“We ripe and ripe. We rot and rot,” Harley says.

“And thereby hangs a tale,” Tony says, sharp, like it’s a swear. “Harley, stop. I’m—”

“I’ve seen it,” Harley says. “Every harvest. Apples start as blossoms, they do, like in movies, and then they’re small and greenish. It takes a while for ‘em to turn red, really red, the way you get ‘em at the store or the— or the market. And as soon as they’re juicy and firm,” Harley gulps, his throat bobbing, “they fall off the fuckin’ tree and into the dirt and get squished under work boots and— bright yellow galoshes. Worm food.” Harley presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “We’re all worm food.” The marrow of his bones cries into the night, its whines swallowed by the wind as it whips around them. 

“Harley,” says Tony.

“This is the best view I’ve ever had,” Harley says.

“ _ Harley,” _ Tony says.

“Tony,” Harley says. Closes his eyes. Breathes. “I guess I have something to admit to you. I’ve been keeping—”

“Stop it,” Tony snaps, and Harley’s eyes fly open in shock. Tony clenches his jaw, gives Harley an apologetic look. “Sorry. Sorry, kid. Didn’t mean— just, let’s wait until we’re not, not right here, okay? Okay?”

“It’s okay,” Harley says quietly.

“Please come down,” Tony says. “Please.”

“Okay,” says Harley, because Tony is begging. Tony would drop onto his knees for this. Harley can see it in his eyes.

He steps off the edge, the impact of the roof under the soles of his shoes sending shocks up his legs, rattling his teeth.

“Kid,” says Tony, and he takes Harley’s other elbow into his hand, like he’s holding him down. Is he floating away. He can’t tell. 

“Yeah,” Harley says.

“Do you want to die?” 

“No,” Harley says. “Yes? I don’t— know.”

“Okay,” says Tony. His voice is practiced and even. “We can work with that.” 

“Okay,” Harley says.

“You need to let someone into that thick skull of yours,” Tony says. “You need to stop holding this in, you’re gonna— Harley, you’re gonna fucking burst, and I’d rather keep you whole from the start than have to weld the pieces back together later.”

“Okay,” Harley says, then, “now?”

And Tony says, “that wasn’t— a command,” clunky and awkward, “I didn’t mean it has to be me, kid.”

“Oh,” says Harley. “Sorry.”

_ “No,” _ says Tony. “It can absolutely— make it me, yes, sure, I am fine with that, that’s— good, but if you’re not comfortable with it being me, that’s okay, too—”

“You’re my best friend,” Harley says, because it feels very important that Tony knows this. “You have been for years.”

“Harley,” Tony says like it hurts.

“Sorry,” Harley says.

“No— just—” Tony breaks off. “Can you gimme the skinny?” Tony asks. He drops Harley’s elbows, rubs his own wrinkled forehead. “Let’s talk. Please, kid. I can't fix it if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, using your words.”

Like striking a match, Harley laughs. He laughs and laughs, because he  _ can _ give Tony the skinny, all he can give is skinny, he’s fucking bones clattering, bruises and knocking into corners and wild, angry emptiness. 

“Tony,” he says. “Christ. I don’t— eat, I don’t sleep, I’m— not present, ever, I can’t focus and I don’t want to because when I think, my thoughts are— they’re enormous, they’re fucking huge and they don’t  _ fit _ and I can’t sift through them for the good stuff anymore, I can’t, because I’m tired of coming up with an empty pan. The gold slips through, every time.” Harley pulls sharply on the ends of his hair. Tony reaches out to grab his arm, to stop him, and Harley winces away from the touch, pulling his wrist to his chest, and then he laughs more. “I’m scared of everyone,” he says with an almost maniacal glee. “My dad fucked me up, Tony. I think yours did, too, to you, right? He did? Did he hit you like my dad hit me? Did you go to school black and blue and purple and hide it under t-shirts with the Teletubbies grinning on the front?” Harley gasps. “Don’t— even answer, don’t. I’m sorry, that was fucked up of me. I shouldn’t— it’s not my business.”

“He did,” Tony says. “Did you know it put me in the same place?”

“On the edge of a roof?” Harley says.

“James Rhodes pulled me off of the Engineering Building at MIT,” Tony says. “I handled it the same way you did, just— different. I drank and took drugs until I puked up blood. I let girls take what they wanted, let guys take what they wanted— let anyone and everyone take what they wanted from me until there was nothing left.”

“Hollow,” Harley says. His ears are ringing like every word off Tony’s lips is a gong he’s hammering.

“Even the shell was decrepit by then,” Tony says. He is not bitter, but factual. “I see you, Harley. You’re empty. You gave yourself up. For your sister, for your mom.”

Harley nods and nods and nods.

“Please,” Tony says. “Let me help you find reasons to live for  _ you,  _ not for other people. Like good coffee, and ghost stories, and those little rocks with the googly eyes you’ve got on your windowsill.”

“Selfish,” Harley breathes.

“No,” Tony says. “What? Harley. Why would it be selfish?”

“What have I done to deserve that?” Harley says, and Tony’s face falls.

“Why do you think you need to do something to deserve a good life, huh? Who made you think that way? I’ll give ‘em the ol’ one-two, I— will actually send Happy after them because I am old and less capable of fighting people with my angry fists than I like to make it seem.”

Harley shrugs.

Tony takes a deep breath, and his lips are pursed in that way that says he’s holding emotions back. A cracked dam, a leak spitting out of it. Harley wishes he could ache, seeing it. “We’ll work on that,” he says. “Okay, kiddo? You and me. We’re gonna— fix that, adjust that way of thinking, just a little tinkering and we’ll be good to go.”

“I’m not a machine,” Harley says.

“You’re not,” Tony says. “You know what you are, though? Harley? You’re my kid.”

Harley’s eyes flutter close. 

“Is that okay?” says Tony.

Harley nods, his lips pressed together. A single tear drips out of his eye, warm and slow tracing a trail down his cheek, clinging to the hard edge of his jaw. 

“Harley,” Tony says. “You’re safe.”

“I know,” Harley says.

“And I’m here for you,” Tony says.

“Tony,” Harley says. 

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Can we go inside?” Harley says.

“Yes,” Tony says.  _ “God, _ yes.”

They settle on the couch cushions, a foot of space between them. Tony pulls a throw blanket off the back of the couch and drapes it over Harley’s shoulders, waits for Harley to fist the edges between his hands before he lets go, settles back in his seat.

“Have you ever tried before?” Tony blurts. His jaw is clenched, like he’s bracing for the answer. “To— do that? The thing you almost did?”

“Yes,” Harley says, watching Tony’s eyes close. “Earlier this year. I took— sleeping pills, my momma’s sleeping pills, but I guess I didn’t take enough of them. I think, subconsciously, I didn’t want to. Not really. Or else I would’ve finished the bottle.”

“Does she know?” Tony says.

“No,” Harley says.

“Harley,” Tony says.

Harley slips his hand into Tony’s, more for the man’s sake than his own.

“I knew something was wrong,” Tony says quietly, his jaw going tight as he swallows. “I just didn’t know what. Didn’t know it was this big.”

“You could tell?” Harley says.

Tony looks at him. Staring into his eyes is like watching the library of Alexandria burn to ash. “Of course I could,” he says. “We’re connected.”

“It doesn’t feel like—” Harley says. “I don’t feel anything,” he whispers, “ever. It’s winter all the time.”

“Isn’t that lonely?” Tony says.

“I’m  _ so lonely,” _ Harley says, and it rides on the back of a sob, crashes like a wave bowling over into itself, swallowed and reused. 

“I’ll— I’m here,” Tony says, and then repeats it, louder, squeezing Harley’s hand. “I’m  _ here.  _ I’ll help you make it better. We’ll make it better.” The look in his eyes— like the flames are licking up his legs, his hands roped behind his back, the smoke in his eyes. A sentiment made no less strong for its sweetness. 

Harley is shivering under the blanket, his hands white-knuckled. 

“Maybe you should— take a shower,” Tony whispers. 

“Okay,” Harley says back, equally quietly.

Tony follows Harley to his bedroom, watches Harley collect a pair of sweatpants, a fleece half-zip, a pair of boxers, socks. 

Harley steps into the bathroom.

Tony’s voice comes choked, “I’ll wait right here,” he says.

Harley thinks Tony would wait in the bathroom if he thought he could get away with it.

“Okay,” says Harley. He leaves the door open a crack.

Staring at the wood plank, he is mortified, deeply, irrevocably, hot-faced and sniffling through a sudden onslaught of tears. Jesus Christ, he let this happen. He let Tony find out. Tony’s going to kick him out and he’s going to have to go back home to the dust and the cows and the ghost of his pa slinking under doorways, chugging a beer with one fist clenching, opening, clenching white fucking knuckled.

Harley climbs into the shower, pulls the dark blue curtains closed- they shroud the whole tub in shadow, they scratch his fingers, the thick cotton, everything is tender, he is raw- and turns the water on hard and hot. He closes his eyes, lets the steam hit him. Pretends his lungs don’t fold in shame when Tony pads into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the countertop, his silhouette barely visible through the double layer of dark cotton and plastic curtains.

Harley washes his hair and he washes his face and he scrubs at his skin until he’s red, then brushes his hands over the marks, willing them to disappear. 

Harley flicks the water off. Breathes. He thinks this might have been biblical; sacramental; baptismal. 

Tony tosses a towel over the shower curtain for him. 

Tony spots the littering of light scars on Harley’s hips over the top of his towel. They’re thin, white, nothing to write home about. He was always too scared to press much harder. 

Tony’s eyes close after he sees them, and his throat bobs, and his hands shake. He presses his right thumb into his left wrist and holds it, squeezing. 

Harley goes back into his bedroom to change into his sweats, leaving Tony in the quickly dissipating steam.

Once dressed, Harley returns to the bathroom. He brushes his teeth while Tony watches. He combs out his hair while Tony watches. He rubs a thick coating of moisturizer onto his face, his hands, runs curl cream through his hair while Tony watches.

Harley goes back into his bedroom and sits on the bed.

Tony follows after a moment with a hair dryer in his hand. Harley doesn’t usually dry his hair, but.

“Let me take care of you,” Tony says. “For the love of god, let someone take care of you for once.”

Harley breathes. Nods.

Tony plugs it in. Sits behind Harley on the bed. Runs his fingers through Harley’s thin waves as he dries them, the air stiflingly hot, Tony’s skin rough and graded, his thumb pressing into Harley’s neck, his short fingernails scratching through the hair at his nape.

“Tony,” Harley says after a minute. 

Tony turns off the hair drier and sets it aside. “Yeah? Buddy?”

“Why am I— here?”

Tony’s thoughts are almost audible. 

“Like,” Harley continues, his tongue heavy. “Like, why are you letting me stay?”

Tony says, “Harley. I’m not going to ask you to leave. I would never kick you out for this. For anything, unless you, like, killed Pepper or Peter, which you wouldn’t.”

“Never,” Harley says. “Well, Peter, maybe. He’s sort of annoying.”

Tony’s lips twitch up and then drop, his expression turning into something horrified, like he started to laugh at gallows humor before realizing who it was swinging. 

Tony shifts to sit with his back against the headboard, his legs straight in front of him. Harley mirrors his position. 

“You’re here to heal,” Tony says quietly. “And I think I— I am, too. So we can— make a life we don’t need to heal from. Never again.”

Harley swipes his sleeve under his nose. 

“Is that— okay?” Tony asks. “I keep asking you that, I sound like a broken record, but. I figure I ought to ask, right?” There’s something in his voice, like running into the sea only to find the shallows full of rocks, cutting at the soles of your feet. Tony is waiting for the pain, for the blood. 

“That’s okay,” Harley says. Then, “I think we’ve. Gone through enough. To deserve it.”

Tony’s arm winds slowly towards Harley’s shoulders, giving him the space to pull away. Harley presses into the touch, feeling some terrible spinning top in his chest begin to slow, a blur of colors clarified. Tony pulls him closer. “I think you might be right,  _ patatino.”  _

Harley leans back a quarter of an inch. “Did you just— unabashedly and without regret call me  _ little potato.”  _

“Yes,” says Tony. “Fitting, right?”

“I was eleven,” Harley says. “I fire a potato gun at you one time and I can’t live it down for the rest of my life.” 

Tony’s chin hooks over his shoulder. “The rest of your long, long life,” Tony mutters, his chest rumbling against the hardness of Harley’s bicep. 

Harley closes his eyes. “Do you think me moving here is me becoming like my father?” he says.

If the abrupt subject change startles Tony, he doesn’t show it. “No. No, that’s not at all what this is, in any universe, not even one where everything is— completely wrong. Not even then.”

“I ran away, didn’t I?” Harley says.

“No,” says Tony. “You didn’t run away. You left a toxic situation that was damaging the shit out of your health; that isn’t running away. That’s finding safety, that’s—giving yourself a chance to really live.”

Harley turns his face into Tony’s chest. “Okay,” he says.

One of Tony’s hands slides up from Harley’s shoulder, lands in his hair. His fingers scratch gently at Harley’s scalp. “Any other questions? I’ll sit here all night untangling wires for you.”

Harley’s face folds, and his breathing stutters, and Tony’s arms wrap tighter.

“Shh,” says Tony, and it sounds normal coming from him. This is not strange. This is resolution after a seventh chord, a moment of easy breath. “I’ve got you, kid.”

“You’ve got me,” Harley says.

“I’ve got you,” Tony affirms.

Harley lets Tony hold him until the unsteady thrum of his heart below Harley’s ear drags him towards sleep. 

“Stay,” Harley croaks, yanking on the edge of Tony’s shirt. Clinging to consciousness to get these last words out. “Please. Please, stay.”

Tony’s hands are solid and warm on Harley’s shoulder, on the skin of his neck. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispers. “Sleep.”

Like he’s under a spell, Harley falls.

—

Harley picks up a paintbrush after he swallows his Lexapro for the seventeenth day in a row. His arm is being pulled by strings Pinocchio-style, and Gepetto in the rafters has a plan. Harley has no input. Has he ever? This is no different, except it is.

He globs acrylics onto a fresh glass palette and dips into the blue, feeling like Picasso in nineteen-oh-one, mixing up a navy like ocean trenches and under-the-bed shadows and midnight while lying prone in the wheat fields with hives across his chest.

He coats the canvas, edge to sharp edge. 

He grabs the oils in their perfect, unused tubes, a palette knife, and starts layering terrible blots of black and grey and goldish ochre, building until it seems like they are clambering out of the canvas of their own will, spindly-fingered things with ill-intent, and Harley watches them. 

He drops the palette onto the stretch of plastic tarp beneath the easel. He wipes the brushes, lets them and the palette knife into the cup of solvent, emotionless. Too tired to properly clean them.

He climbs onto the bed and lays face-down on top of the covers, a smudge of blue on his cheekbone and an itch deep in his stomach he cannot reach to scratch.

—

Tony has a way of watching Harley without watching Harley.

Sometimes it takes the form of him sitting beside Harley in the kitchen as he chokes down a slice of toast with avocado smeared on it. Not eating himself, just watching and squeezing the back of Harley’s neck in his warm, rough hand once he’s done. 

Sometimes it’s FRIDAY, chirping updates as to where Harley is, what he’s doing. His heart rate. His blood pressure. His serotonin levels. Harley has no idea how Tony manages to get brain scans of that quality from his glorified SmartHome, but whatever.

Sometimes it’s Pepper, knocking gently on his door before bed to ask if he needs anything,  _ another blanket, a glass of water, anything? I’ve got you, kid. _

It’s always something. Which is why Harley wonders what it is malfunctioning that allows him to be standing on the balcony at twelve-twenty-six at night without the Iron Legion forming a metal barricade around the edge of it.

Harley can’t sleep, is the problem. So he’s trying to get some air. Into his lungs. To breathe. To feel the sharp chill of February fill him up, settle, sting. Like a mouthful of seawater, like burrowing into snow, like pushing into glass and getting stuck, molding into it, eternal, delicate. Dainty.

Harley won’t fall. (A mess of porcelain shards on Park Avenue, like a dinner table upended, like a picnic stomped through, like grabbing antiques in his fist and tossing them because  _ this _ is real, Harley is real if he can break and be broken.) 

That’s not what he’s here for. He’s just here to breathe.

Something is off. Harley knows what it is, but he hates to admit it. He’s been doing well. Really, he has. He’s bruiseless, his smiles feel natural on his face sometimes, he’s writing. He auditioned for the fucking musical. He’s playing Seymour in  _ Little Shop of Horrors, _ which has been one of his dream roles for forever. He hasn’t even thought about food.

Wherein lies the problem, really. 

He didn’t eat today. Up and forgot. Peter was home sick with the flu; Tony was in a meeting— yes, miracle of miracles, Tony actually went to a meeting. Leaving Harley to fend for himself.

More than anything, Harley is frustrated. All of these months have passed and he’s still incapable of taking care of himself. The medication, the speeches from Tony, the prods from Peter and Pepper. What was it worth, if he’s so clumsy his hands make it loose, make it dissipate, he’s grabbing at smoke in the wind. Nothing is certain. He tries so hard and still nothing at all is certain. God. Nothing is nothing is he.

Harley breathes. Fills up. Feels the breeze whistle between the wildflowers in his lungs.

He goes back inside. The glass doors shut cleanly behind him. For some reason the living room is imponderable for a languid moment in the silver wave of moonlight.

Harley wants to feel strong. He wants to be good. He owes it to Tony, to himself. To himself. To  _ himself. _

He strides to the kitchen, pulls a cabinet open. Stares, mouth suddenly dry.

Closes his eyes. Breathes. Come on. This is easy. 

Because Peter is so far up his ass he can feel him tickling his tonsils, he grabs the box of matzoh and snags one enormous, unwieldy cracker. He walks over to the sink and cracks it, biting a piece off. He chews slowly. It’s plain. He breathes, and he chews. His pulse hammers in his wrist. This is like sin. Like he’s smoking a blunt out the kitchen window. Like he could get hit for this. 

He won’t, he promises himself. There’s no one left to do it but him. He’ll sit on his goddamn hands if he has to. He’s hurt enough. This hurts enough to be punishment and sick pleasure at once. 

Harley finishes the whole damn thing. He brushes his hands off over the sink. 

Braces two shaking elbows on the lip of the marble and swallows, compulsively, aggressively.

His eyes flick to the time blinking over the oven. To the doors to the balcony. 

He goes again. Sits in the chill feeling raised from the grave, a corpse enlightened, and waits for Tony.

The sun comes up and Tony sits in the living room. Harley hears his footsteps approach, the sigh of the leather couch. But he does not come out. Harley hears what he never says:  _ I trust you. _

The dawn wind wrinkles around him. 

_ I am here, _ Harley thinks.  _ I am not what I am. I am beginning.  _

—

Harley is watching  _ Ancient Aliens _ with Rhodey. 

They hang out often, actually. The Colonel is sassy and devilishly smart, and Harley likes to think Rhodes tolerates him, whether he’s quiet or hyperfixating or his moods are bouncing like the drum beat to a swing number underneath a roaring alto sax. 

Mondays, they watch the Bachelor. It’s a scheduled thing; if one of them is busy, they text the other to let them know. They make popcorn. They have a list with guesses re: who will get a rose and who will be kicked off every week. They’re invested. (Harley likes feeling invested. He likes being invested in things with other people. Good people. Rhodey has become something of a friend— a constant in his life. This is especially nice because he and Happy do not get along all that well, and not in the cute  _ oh, I pretend to hate the kid _ way Happy and Peter get on; Harley is too timid and Happy too deadpan for their personalities to mesh well. But Rhodey? He’s just nurturing enough for it to work out. It’s a bit cute of Harley and Peter, actually. They both claimed one of Tony‘s best friends, and get to share the man himself. And Pepper, of course, who has loved them like her own since they first started hanging around the tower.)

One time, Rhodey brought him to the Intrepid museum. He even bought him a souvenir hat. 

Now, though, they’re sitting in comfortable shared silence, wearing creases into the too-stiff leather couch, a few inches between them, squinting at the blueprints of Stonehenge. 

FRIDAY blares above then. 

_ “Kiss It Better protocol enacted.” _

“Shit,” says Rhodey.

“What?” says Harley. “What, what?”

Rhodey pauses the television. “You ever seen someone bleed out?” he asks.

“No,” says Harley. “What the fuck? When— why? Would I have?”

“I don’t know what shit you get up to in your free time, I didn’t want to assume,” Rhodey says. “You’re about to see a lot of blood, is all.”

“From who?” Harley says, though he knows.

“Peter,” says Rhodey. “It’s always Peter.”

“Shit,” says Harley. “Oh, man, shit. Is he okay? Is he gonna be okay?” Harley’s voice rises. “Is he gonna die?”

Rhodey says, “man, chill out. This happens, like, twice a week. He’s gonna be fine.”

“You promise?”

Rhodey visibly swallows. “Let’s go make sure the Medbay is set up.”

They’re down there with sterilized equipment and open beds and a medical team on standby when Tony comes clanging around a corner in his metal suit with Peter in his arms, dripping blood from the stomach, a trail of deep maroon following them. It smells rusty and sweet. 

They drop Peter on a gurney and roll him towards the operating room, Tony following as far as he’s able, until two doctors shoulder him away, and still Tony calls after them, “you’re good, buddy, I’ll see you in a minute, okay? Promise. I’m gonna holler at you so bad when you’re out of there! Be ready!”

Peter, his face grey, shoots Tony a blood-stained thumbs up before he disappears around the corner. 

The sight has Harley so overwhelmed that he immediately bursts into violent tears, which escalate quickly into a panic attack, which he can’t seem to calm himself down from and, thus, he pukes spectacularly into a potted plant. It’s at this point that Tony offers to sedate him. He says no, but he considers it. Seriously. It’s the thought of being out when Peter wakes up that keeps him from indulging. 

Peter’s in surgery until after three in the morning. The bullet had nicked his right lung, collapsing it like a punctured balloon, and perforated his liver. Peter will be fine, they say, he’ll be awake soon, and his advanced healing is so miraculously fast that all he’ll experience is some pain and discomfort under his ribs for a few days. Harley wonders why, if it’s so godly, it takes so long for those damn doctors to patch him up. He has a nerd to punch and they’re holding him up. 

Harley stays the whole time, cross-legged in the hallway, glaring daggers at anyone who shoots him a strange look. 

When Peter is moved into a recovery room, Harley follows. He then proceeds to shove Peter’s body aside and crawl into the narrow space between Peter’s hip and the plastic edge of the bed. 

“You should sleep,” May tells him from where she sits on Peter’s other side, holding his hand. “It’s late, he’d want you to rest. He’s good like that.”

“Too good,” Harley agrees. “He’d probably get pissed if he knew we’re sitting here.” He looks at Peter. “I can’t leave. My brain is telling me that if I close my eyes for even one second, he will die on the spot.” 

May looks at him dryly, then huffs. “You all just attract each other, you crazies.”

Harley doesn’t say that being lumped in a group with Peter and the implied Tony is the best compliment she could’ve given him. 

The man is in and out of the room until daybreak, hovering and then drilling doctors and then running to the lab to make notes on schematics for an improved suit. His eyes are harried, bag-laden. He trembles. Harley wants to sit him down, but he understands the feeling, so he doesn’t. 

Peter is awake by six, hungry and drowsy and disoriented. 

“Mph,” he says, his eyes scrunching and then opening slightly, slivers of white visible through his lashes. He shivers. “P’ncakes.” 

“Nah, just me,” says Harley. 

Peter cracks an eye open, gives Harley a once over, then squints it shut. “You look like shit,” he says.

“Says you!” Harley says, feeling an awful lot like shit. 

Peter says, “how’d you… even get here.”

“I grew wings and flew myself into your hospital bed,” Harley says, “but the doctors decided to amputate those feathery bastards so animal control wouldn’t come after me. I didn’t need ‘em, anyway. We already have a superhero with wings.”

“He’s… a’legal,” says Peter. 

“You’re right, he is illegal,” Harley says. “He has memories, Miss May. That’s a pretty good sign, I think”

“May,” Peter says, and his eyes shoot open. “Oh, man, May, m’sorry.”

A gentle smile spreads on her lips. “Honey. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“You mad a’me?”

“No, Peter,” she says. 

“So I’m not grounded?”

“Oh,” she says. “No, you’re absolutely grounded, like six feet under the ground grounded, but that’s a problem for later,” she says sweetly, and that’s when Tony comes hurtling around the corner and into the room, wearing a t-shirt adorned with Bob Ross and bright green shamrock patterned boxers, his eyes wide and sharp and hair a messy halo. 

“FRIDAY told me you woke up,” Tony says. 

“Mis’er S’ark,” Peter says. “MTV welcome to… my crib.”

“I bought this crib,” Tony says. “Welcome to  _ my _ crib, which you spend— far too much time crashing in, please stay in your own crib, and stop— bleeding on my sheets, Jesus, are you good? Do you feel okay?”

“You got me on th’ _ good _ stuff,” Peter says, and a little grin stretches his lips. A bubble of spit pokes out of the corner. 

Tony drags a hand through his hair. He comes closer, then, pulling a second chair over by May and falling heavily into it. “You scared us real bad, squirt,” Tony says. “Not to make you feel worse, but we sorta— lost it.”

“I puked,” Harley says. 

“Hands’re shaking,” Peter notices, grabbing both of Harley’s in his. 

“Yeah, ‘cuz you scared the shit out of me,” Harley says, his voice bouncing up an octave. 

“Sorry,” Peter says. “Sowwy, man,” and he mashes Harley’s hands to his cheek. “Does this fix it?”

“Cuddling my hands?” Harley says. He stops and thinks for a moment. “A little,” he says, grudgingly. 

“‘S my favorite show,” mumbles Peter.

“Uh, what?” says Harley.

_ “Chuggington,” _ Peter sings.  _ “Chugga chugga chugga—” _

“Oh, my god,” says Harley.

“This is nothing compared to the usual,” says Tony. He lifts a hand and rubs Peter’s shin over the blankets. “Sometimes he lays there reciting atomic formulas, or, like entire episodes of Spongebob.”

“One time he peed the bed,” says May.

“Oh, yeah,” Tony nods, “how could I forget that? Ah, perhaps because my brain forced post-traumatic amnesia after I had to change the sheets for him.”

“You didn’t have to raise him at the age he regularly peed the bed,” says May. “You were paying your dues.”

“Stop talking about… my pee…” says Peter.

“Gladly,” says Tony. He sniffs. “Are you gonna sleep again? You should. Sleep. To heal the chest piercing you got a few hours ago.”

Peter smacks his lips. “Sleepin’s for babies.” His eyes fall shut. “I happen t’be… a baby.”

Harley snorts. “Anyone could’ve told you that.”

Rhodey comes into the doorway and leans there, arms crossed. “You good, kid?” he asks. 

Peter grins without opening his eyes. “Uncle Rhodey,” he says. He drools some more. Harley grabs the corner of the sheet and dabs at the corner of Peter’s lip. 

“He’s assed,” says Rhodey. 

“D’you think Elmo poops out of… the hole they put their hand in.”

“Yeah, he is,” Tony says to Rhodey. “But he’s fine. Stitched up good.”

Rhodey relaxes a fraction. “Glad to hear it,” he says. “Wouldn’t have wanted to deal with what you’d be like if he wasn’t.”

“I would literally rather die,” says Tony. “I would ask you to take me out with one of my own lasers and make it look like an accident.”

“I’d kill you again… in heaven,” says Peter, “if you did tha’.”

“I’m shaking in my boots,” says Tony, pushing Peter’s hair off his forehead. “Sleep,” Tony says softly. “You need it to heal. We’ll discuss later, once you’re coherent and can appreciate the full gale of anger I’m going to bestow upon you. Peter Screws The Pooch, part I Lost Count out of Infinite.”

Peter snores. 

Tony and May give a shared sigh and slump in their seats. Harley leans his temple against Peter’s shoulder.

They sit by his side, because that is what they do: stick together. No matter what.

—

_ “Harley.” _ Poppy’s voice is full of emotion, the surf crashing against the jetty, leaning into every syllable like digging graves.  _ “Oh, Harley. Harley, you just have to see him, you do, you’ll just about lose your mind. Here. Come on, I’m bringing you to see him right now.” _

“Who? What?” says Harley. Poppy’s lips are pursed as if she’s ready to cry, eyes magnified and glossy behind curved lenses. She’s got her own glasses, now, and Harley still isn’t quite used to looking at them on her. She looks like a librarian behind the big, vintage frames.

_ “Pspsps,” _ Poppy says.  _ “Come here, sweetheart, come on, come to mommy.” _ The picture shakes, her phone unsteady in her hands as she walks.

“What the fuck,” Harley says.

_ “Watch your mouth,” _ says Poppy. Then,  _ “ooh, Harley, here he comes, here he comes.” _

“Is that how you talk to all the boys in your life?” he says. “It’s a miracle they even look at you.”

The camera slips away from Poppy’s face again, angles towards the floor, towards Poppy’s cardigan, shaking and blurry and never still. 

_ “Pspspsps,” _ Poppy hisses again. 

“Oh, my god,” says Harley when the camera steadies.

A kitten sits on Poppy’s foot, short and thin and purring like a lawnmower, bright orange and wily and, clearly, a little bastard. It takes one look at Harley’s face on Poppy’s phone screen and positively  _ screams, _ the most high-pitched mewl Harley has ever heard and it hurts his ears and he’s  _ crying, _ “oh, my god, hi, hi sweetheart, hi you cute little angel oh my god Poppy,  _ Poppy _ give him a  _ kiss _ from me, Poppy??”

_ “I know,” _ she howls.  _ “Are you joking me, he’s so small and cute.” _

“I cannot believe Momma is letting you keep him,” Harley sniffles, wiping tears off his cheeks and making faces at the cat. 

_ “That’s the proooblem,” _ Poppy weeps,  _ “she’s not.” _

“She’s not?” Harley yelps. “But look at him, how the  _ fuck _ could she say no to that little face I’m sorry Pop  _ Poppy.” _

_ “I know,” _ she whines, pressing a barrage of kisses onto the cat’s tiny triangle of a head as he screams some more. She’s so distracted she must have forgotten to chastise Harley for cursing. Harley understands. This is an emergency. The all-encompassing type. 

Tony seems to think so too, it seems, for he comes jogging around the corner saying, “FRIDAY says you’re in distress you should’ve called me—” but then freezes when he sees Harley with a blanket cloak over his shoulders sitting snot-nosed in his reading nook with his tablet on his lap. 

“Toooony,” Harley sobs. He brandishes his tablet. “Come look at the little—” he breaks off into what can generously be called gibberish. 

Tony squints at him. Then he comes down onto Harley’s beanbag chair hip to hip with him and looks at the screen, immediately softening. “Hi, oh my goodness, who is this little guy? You cute little shit, oh man, look at his little toe beans, I want one, FRIDAY, make a note because I want one,” he says. 

_ “I haven’t named him yet because it’ll hurt too much to give him away,” _ Poppy cries dramatically. She shoves her face into the camera beside the cat’s, tear-streaked and splotchy.  _ “Hi, Mister Tony, it’s good to see you,” _ she says, her breath hitching between words. 

“Hi, Poppy,” he says. “You can’t keep the cat?”

_ “Momma said no,”  _ Poppy says mulishly.  _ “‘Cuz she’s allergic, which is selfish, I think, seeing as the poor little baby sweetheart doesn’t have anywhere to go, no one to love him.” _

The cat hacks up a hairball. They all  _ aww.  _

Harley sniffles again, his shoulders shaking. “Have mercy,” he whimpers, “that thing is so cute, I’d take a bullet for him already. I’d walk to Rose Hill to give him one single kiss.”

Tony’s hand finds Harley’s shoulder and rubs it, his thumb pressing a comforting weight into the tight muscle. “Didn’t even know you like cats, squirt.”

“Oh my god, Tony,” says Harley, “I love them. They’re such assholes and they smell and they’re definitely plotting to take over the world,” Harley is tearing up again, “and I  _ love them.” _

“Hm,” says Tony. “Dramatic, but your point comes across.”

Harley snuffles. He turns into Tony’s shoulder and wipes his nose on his shirt. 

“You’re disgusting,” Tony says. 

“What if I take that to heart and it traumatizes me for life?” says Harley. 

“I take it back, you’re wonderful, you’re like a July peach, there is no better human in the world, the universe, even. Your B.O. is the scent of my own personal ambrosia baking in the oven and your farts are like the breeze off a sun-baked orchard—”

“Okay,” says Harley, shoving his hand over Tony’s mouth as Tony cackles. “That’s enough from the— peanut gallery over here.”

Poppy has a little smile on her face.  _ “I’m glad to see you,” _ she says,  _ “even if my life is over because I can’t keep this li’l snookums sweetie pie angel face.” _

The cat swipes its claws at the phone. The all  _ aww. _

“Miss you,” Harley says, leaning closer to the phone. “Love you.”

_ “Love you, too, Harls,” _ she says.  _ “I’ll leave you to your bickering so I can enjoy my last precious seconds with my kitty in peace.” _

“We don’t bicker,” says Tony. 

“We absolutely bicker, what the hell d’you call what we just did?” says Harley. 

_ “Bye,”  _ Poppy says pointedly. 

“Mwah,” says Harley, and he hangs up. 

Harley sighs a bit and leans back into Tony’s warmth, grabbing Tony’s nearer hand and wrapping it over his shoulders. Tony’s thumb hooks into the dip over Harley’s collarbone and his fingers scratch gently at the top of Harley’s back. 

“That was a good cry,” Harley says. “I’ve never cried as much in my damn life as I have these past few weeks.”

“You’re melting,” Tony delivers in a dramatic imitation of the Wicked Witch’s infamous demise. 

Harley grins. Tony grins back. 

“I think I like it,” Harley admits. “It’s— scary. But I like it.”

“It’s a good look on you,  _ patatino,” _ Tony says. He slips Harley’s glasses off his nose and blots at his wet cheeks with the end of his sleeve. “I’m really proud of you, you know. I never say shit like that because I physically have to hold back a tsunami of vomit every time I do— thanks to my own trauma, ha ha, but.” He replaces Harley’s glasses. “Yeah, I’m— I want you to know it. Even if I don’t say it much, it’s always true.”

“Thanks, Tony,” Harley says wetly. 

“Let me go yack now,” Tony says through a grimace. “Absolutely disgusting.” He stands slowly, leaning over to ruffle Harley’s hair. 

Harley looks up at him through wet lashes. 

Tony makes an unintentional keening sound like Harley suckerpunched him and he presses a firm kiss to the crown of Harley’s head. “Love you, kid,” he says quietly against Harley’s skin, and Harley’s face folds. 

Tear-streaked and so full of emotion he’s ready to burst like ten in the evening on the fourth of July, a hot Pollock of technicolor joy so stringent it sits like blackberry juice on the back of his tongue, Harley says, “fuck you fuck you fuck you,” and grabs Tony round the waist, pulling him into another hug. “I’m so sorry I made everything so difficult, I’m really trying to be better for you. And me. And— Poppy and Peter and Pepper and my ma. I’m gonna be the best kid ever, I swear, just give me some time.”

“Harley,” Tony says, the hand on the back of Harley’s head pressing his nose hard into Tony’s chest, “you’re already the best kid. You are. Don’t ever apologize for struggling, that’s a load of bullshit, I’ll care about you whether you’re singing  _ Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah _ while skipping through five o’clock traffic in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or whether you’re— places I never want to picture you in, ever, ever.” His chest rises and falls against Harley’s. They’re all crooked and sinking into the beanbag and it’s perfect. It’s everything Harley never had and now it’s pressing against his fingertips. “You’re my kid. Got it? Got it. I say you’ve got it.” 

Harley hiccups. “Sir yes sir,” he says. 

Tony rubs his hair once more. “Okay,” he says. He sniffles. “Fucking fuck, you’re making  _ me _ soft, too, look at this bullshit, I need to go— smoke a cigar while watching a Yankee game and manspreading across the entire couch or something. Cosplay as a brick wall. Chew ice.” He rubs under his eyes. He adds another  _ fuck _ for good measure. 

Harley chuckles a little and wipes under his nose. “Go already, gee whiz. Recover your emotional reservoirs.”

“I need a full renovation of my emotional reservoirs,” Tony grumbles, straightening his shirt as he stands. “A second set of reservoirs to handle the overflow of the first set.  _ Gesù Cristo.” _

“Jelly Crisco,” Harley agrees. 

Tony squints, then shakes his head. Claps a hand against his cheek, lets it slide down. Turns on his heel and starts out Harley’s room. Stops in the doorway. Peers over his shoulder back at Harley’s slumped figure swallowed in his beanbag. Winks. Then goes. 

Harley goes boneless and slides loose out of the beanbag and onto the floor. “I’m such a loser,” he says aloud to himself. “It’s brilliant. I’m the best sappy bastard around, goddammit.”

Positive reinforcement at its finest. 

—

When Harley gets home from school that Friday, he’s startled to find a ball of furry something rolling around on his comforter. 

“Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”

He drops his backpack off his shoulders and it thuds heavily on the hardwood as he rushes forward, his eyes already streaming. He lifts the Havana Brown off his bedsheets and stares into its luminous green eyes, his shoulders shaking, “hi,” he says, “oh my god, hi, hi baby,” he kisses the cat on its head and it makes a noise that’s far closer to a bark than a mewl and Harley weeps, “hi, I love you, oh my god. Oh my god.” 

He stands up and holds the cat between folded arms like a newborn and the cat sniffs at his biceps, at his chest. Stares him dead in the eyes with the wisdom of the Easter Island statues, unshakable and omnipotent, and then proceeds to purr like the engine of the Audi Tony picks him up from school in, smooth and loud and unabashed. The cat’s eyes close and its nose burrows into Harley’s pec and Harley shudders and presses kiss after kiss onto its tiny little head.

The cat shrieks and Harley says, “yes, I know. I know. You’re correct.”

The cat makes a sound like it’s chewing and yodeling all at once and Harley says, “uh huh, good. Good job, I’m so fucking proud of you, you adorable little shit.”

Harley bounces the cat in his arms. “FRIDAY, please oh please play me some appropriate music. From my  _ Ultimate Love Songs  _ playlist. Now now now.”

The first riff of Ray LaMontagne’s  _ You Are The Best Thing _ starts and Harley cries, “oh my  _ god,” _ grabbing his kitten around the back- its entire rear fits in one of his hands, he’s  _ weeping- _ and holding it in proper slow dance position, its short little arms braced on his shoulders, clinging by its stubby claws.

He dances with the cat, serenading it through heaving sobs. 

Tony watches the security footage via FRIDAY and hums along, wiping under his eyes with the back of his hands and thinking he might have finally done something right.

—

Peter is sleeping over tonight.

Not that they haven’t both slept at the tower at the same time before, but, tonight, they’re sleeping in the same room, like  _ friends, _ like brothers. They’re sleeping over  _ together _ rather than  _ coincidentally; _ Peter is sleeping over to be with Harley rather than Tony, and that is a big deal. It’s Harley’s first sleepover with a friend. He wants it to be perfect.

He and Stevie- his perfect little shithead, named after the most important Stevie- the one of Nicks fame- had cleaned up his bedroom real nice. They’re burning a fall-scented candle and there’s string lights over the top of the window, around the crease of the walls. Harley put away his paints, stowed his video game controllers under the bed, changed his sheets. Watered his plants, even, just to be sure everything is in the spiffiest of conditions.

He groomed Stevie, even though she hated it.

Now, Harley is sitting cross-legged on the floor, plucking riffs on his tiny ukulele to pass time. Stevie yowls along with the chords as good as her namesake. 

_ “Harley,” _ says FRIDAY,  _ “Peter Parker has arrived and I have directed him towards your quarters.” _

“Ahhhh,” says Harley. “Ahh. Ahhh.”

Stevie butts his kneecap with her head. 

“Thanks, you lovely stinky bastard,” he tells her.

Harley rises and moves to stow his uke, clambering to his knees on his mattress. It hangs behind his bed, on the brick wall from a set of hooks, between his old acoustic and his Gibson. Something he bought for himself with the money he’s made while busking on street corners and in subway stations. Something  _ his _ between something from his dad and something from his— Tony.

Footsteps approach and Harley shoves his hands into his pockets. He pulls out his phone.

“You know how much I love the Beatles, right? And Elton John?” says Harley before Peter is even a full step into the room. He queues up a video.

“... Yes?” says Peter. 

“Then you’ll understand what a big deal it is for me to say the best version—” he breaks off to wheeze when he sees the cover of the video. “The best version of  _ Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds _ is absolutely and undeniably the William Shatner dramatic reading of the lyrics.”

“William Shatner of Star Trek fame?”

“Do you know another William Shatner?”

“No, I can’t say I do.”

“Then, yes, William Shatner of Star Trek fame.”

“I must see this video right now.”

“I concur, you really truly must.”

Peter tosses his backpack on the ground and leaps onto the bed beside Harley, bouncing the mattress. Stevie climbs into Peter’s lap and Peter scratches behind her ears distractedly. Stevie loves Peter. Possibly more than she loves Harley, which is rude.

Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds later, Peter is enlightened and Harley is wiping tears off his cheeks. 

“I,” Harley howls. “I can’t  _ believe _ they let him  _ dooo this.” _

“I shouldn’t be surprised you enjoy this so much,” says Peter. Stevie is glaring at Harley, likely for the stupid sound he’s making. “Your taste is— so questionable.”

“My taste is prist _\- iiiiihehehehene_ Peter  _ Peter _ this is the height of entertainment! This is— luxury!!” 

“Yeah, well, you unironically wear Birkenstocks, so I really should’ve known not to trust your opinion,” says Peter. “How goyish can you possibly be.”

“Stocks and socks is a progressive fashion choice and just because you’re too vanilla to appreciate it doesn’t mean my fashion sense is inherently flawed,” Harley says. He tries to calm himself with a deep breath and it shudders. He lifts Stevie off Peter’s lap and strokes her as he talks, his voice slipping up a few keys into a soft baby-speak for the sake of the kitten. “Elton John would agree with me. Also, it’s part of queer culture.”

“You’re an embarrassment to Elton John and the queer community,” Peter says. “I’m mortified to identify the same way as you, truly.”

“Y’know,” Harley says. He settles against his headboard and Peter slumps next to him, legs straight and arms folded and head turned towards Harley. Stevie wriggles loose from Harley’s grip and melts into a furry loaf on his lap. “I didn’t realize how disastrously, horrendously bisexual I am until, like, a few months ago. I used to think I was staring at boys ‘cuz I wanted to look like ‘em— not look at  _ me,  _ in their  _ pants.” _

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I think any unaware bisexual would look at you and wonder if they’re in love or just want to look like you, too.”

“You sycophant,” says Harley. “It’s a miracle I can keep my ego this small what with all your flattery. Lucky I fit it through the door at all.”

“An  _ ego,  _ you?” Peter squints. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you. I can’t even— dude, I can't even joke about you having an ego, that’s how far from the truth it is.”

“I have pride,” Harley protests. 

_ “Dude,” _ says Peter. “Sometimes I think I don’t even know you,” Peter sniffs, wiping an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye. “Next thing you’ll say is you’re a Slytherin and then I’ll just have to commit ritual seppuku right here, right now.”

“What do you have against Slytherins, huh?” says Harley. He lifts a yowling Stevie again and rises onto his knees, angling her so the two of them are both looking down at Peter, and raises his voice. “Draco Malfoy deserved a goddamn redemption arc way more than Severus Snape ever did. Snape wasn’t bad because he was a Slytherin; he was a limp cock and his assholeishness was just a bonus. Regulus Black should’ve been revealed to have been alive the whole time and helped Harry in book seven but it would’ve been— tense and beautiful because he would’ve looked like Sirius but he would’ve had a totally different personality except with key similarities because they were brothers—”

Peter is squinting at Harley. “Dude,” he says. “Your passion is actually startling. I’ve never seen you this fired up about anything, ever.”

Harley sinks onto his heels. 

“No,” Peter says quickly, “keep going, keep going seriously I’m intrigued don’t stop now!”

Harley says, “are you sure?”

_ “Yes,” _ says Peter. “Absolutely. Do you have a hot take on Dumbledore?”

_ “Oh my god, yes.” _

It is easy to talk to Peter. Like the rapids roaring between his ears have steadied into languid streams, his canoe is steady, he can trace his fingernails over the grooves in the wood and feel sure. Peter smiles easily but it takes work to pull a laugh from him and the pleasure it brings Harley is untouchable. He wants Peter to laugh for hours. He wants Peter’s laugh to be his ringtone, his alarm in the morning, the sound played as he goes to sleep. 

He could brave the savannah with Peter at his side. Could climb ochre cliffs to watch the sky turn powder pink over a canyon. Could run his legs sore, weak, shaky. Could punch a ghost on the nose. Rob a bank, maybe. 

“Hey,” Peter says suddenly, interrupting a conversation about Tom and Jerry, or something. 

“Hm?” says Harley. He’s ended up with his heels braced on the wall, his legs pressing flat against the plaster. Stevie is sitting on his stomach and kneading his chest.

“You want to grab something to eat? I’m starved,” Peter says. 

Harley says, “sure,” and then blinks. 

“I’m kvelling. What do you want?” says Peter, pulling out his phone. 

“Chinese?” he says, and then blinks. 

“Perfect,” says Peter. “That butters my brisket sufficiently.”

Things move on. 

They eat sesame tofu and lo mein while upside down on the bed. Stevie chews a piece of sliced turkey— a treat. “Dis restaurant is awesome,” Peter says through a mouthful, “because dey’re cerr’fied kosher.”

“Coo’,” Harley says. He swallows heavily. “Hey. Thanks.”

“For why?” says Peter. He’s got a frown turning the corners of his lips and a pair of dimples pop out near his chin. 

“Being my friend and all that hooey,” says Harley. 

“Dude,” Peter says, and socks him on the shoulder. 

“Yeah, yeah,” says Harley, and he grins. It’s easier, now. 

Tony drops in then, for a moment or two, grabbing the cat and cradling her as he drills them.

“Are you drunk?” Tony asks.

“No,” Harley says.

“Smoking?”

“No,” says Peter.

Tony’s nose twitches and he says, “please don’t tell me if you’re, like, doing _ things—” _

“No,” Harley yelps. “Have  _ mercy, _ no.”

“Okay, honestly, I didn’t want to say anything but I was  _ so _ nervous about it happening unsafely, no protection right under my nose, when I could just, like,  _ get _ you condoms—”

“Please,” Harley says. “I’m begging you to stop right now.”

Peter has his hands pressed firmly over his ears, his cheeks and forehead gone bright red.

“I’m changing the topic,” says Tony. “Did you brush your teeth? Wash your faces? Comb your hair?”

“Yes, mom,” says Peter, opening one eye to squint at Tony, as if peeking at a burned building to make sure it’s stopped smoking.

“Yes, mom,” says Harley.

“Lemme smell,” says Tony.

“Oh my god,” says Harley.

“Is he serious? Are you serious?” says Peter, facing Harley, then Tony. There is a sense of desperation in the question.

“I’m… kidding?” Tony says. “Do— am I not supposed to do that? I don’t know how this works.”

“How what works? What?” says Peter.

“Kids!” Tony cries. “Scary, dirty beasts, I don’t know how to take care of ‘em, I don’t.”

“We’re seventeen,” says Harley. “Breathe, man.”

“I’m not your  _ man,” _ Tony says, shifting Stevie onto one of his arms and massaging his chest with his free knuckles. “I am— I don’t know what I am, but I am not  _ man.” _

“Dude?” Peter suggests.

“No.”

“Weird uncle?” Harley says.

“That one— actually hurt my feelings a little.”

Harley smiles softly. “We love you,” he says, and the words float. They might have once been like cauldrons worth of poison poured into vials like liquid jewels, dripping angular swamps from his tongue, but now. “The way Max loves Goofy. Kid style—  _ your kids _ style.”

Tony blinks, and blinks, and sniffles. “I,” he says. “Cool. That’s— cool, cool nice to hear that.”

Peter’s cheeks are red. They’re all ferociously ruddy. “We’re gonna get better at this,” Harley declares. “Being a family. We’re gonna get so goddamn good at this.”

The other two continue to flush. Tony scoops Stevie closer to his chest and massages her head. 

“Man, we got screwed over,” Harley says. “You know it’s bad if I’m the one talking in the awkward moment.”

“You’re a real one, taking one for the team,” says Peter.

“I must leave,” Tony announces. 

“You really must,” Harley says. “We’re gonna summon demons in a minute but we want you gone first because if they see you, they might get pissed at us for being acquainted with you.”

Tony holds up his pointer and pinky fingers like a pair of horns. “Remember the salt circle,” he says.

“Will do,” Peter nods. “We’ll be careful.”

Tony squints. “Goodnight. Sleep a little.”

Harley and Peter share a look.

“Alright, I’m— out,” says Tony. He gives Stevie a final kiss on the top of the head and then sets her on the ground. She scampers over to Peter, sinks her claws into his shirt, and climbs up onto his shoulder. 

Tony shoots a peace sign and disappears around the door.

“Never ask if we’re screwing each other again,” Harley calls after his retreating form. He turns towards Peter. “He tries so hard,” he says.

“He really does. It’s cute,” says Peter.

“Heartfelt,” Harley agrees.

“We’ll make it work,” says Peter. “Gotta wear it in first.”

“Like socks,” says Harley sagely.

Peter throws his head back and laughs.

They don’t end up summoning demons, but they watch four hours worth of  _ The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel _ and then Peter dangles from the ceiling and tosses a baseball with Harley until he dozes and falls down onto Harley’s bed. They mark that the hour for sleep, shoving into sweatpants and t-shirts, brushing their teeth and telling FRIDAY to tell Tony they had.

“If you don’t kiss the homies good night, are you even homies?” Harley says once he’s perched on the edge of the bed that touches the wall, puckering his lips and blowing a stream of kisses at Peter. 

Peter throws himself through the air, diving to catch each floating kiss. Harley laughs and laughs until his ribs feel toughened. Peter presses the imaginary kisses to his cheeks and melts, sighing like a nineteen-thirties ingenue, and Harley says, through his giggles, “have me—  _ hahahave meeercy.”  _

Peter climbs under the sheets next to Harley as Harley recovers, sniffling and running through with the aftershocks of his laughter. 

“I like your laugh,” Peter says conversationally. “‘S my favorite.”

“Dude,” says Harley, his chest suddenly tight. 

“You should do it more often,” Peter says. 

_ “Dude,” _ Harley says. “You got me crying in this Chili’s tonight.”

“I just speak the truth,” Peter says, laying on his side to face Harley head-on. Their knees knock. 

“Well,” Harley says. “Golly.”

Peter snorts. “I’m always astounded when you go all Southern Belle,” he says. “I forget you’re a redneck because you’re so dainty about it.”

“Through and through,” Harley says primly. “Someone powder my nose. Where  _ eva’  _ is my petticoat?”

“Disgusting,” says Peter through his grin. 

Harley lets himself smile, feeling the wonderful ache of it. It’s the best feeling. Like glorious choirs and a hymn of his own composition; like this is hallelujah but there’s no god to praise. Hard to believe. This is holiness, he thinks. Reconciliation. Growth. He’s growing into himself, like ivy crawling up brick buildings, catching the light of the sun on his leaves like dastardly shards of emerald but damn if he doesn’t have the power to rip stone out of the earth. Beautiful but with a ferocity, a kinetic energy, mighty and pretty all in one. Wrap him in a bow; this is the best he’ll ever be— by Peter’s side. 

They whisper over their pillows like kids. Giggle as the room goes silver and dark. Peter falls asleep with a hand clasped around Harley’s wrist like a bracelet. Harley sleeps with his lips pulled into a grin, his snuffling breaths ruffling Peter’s loose curls. 

—

Harley Keener is a strange, wild boy. Even at seventeen, his hair dries in frizzy curls like he wears electric sockets as rings. He blinks purplish eyelids over grayish eyes and has a thousand mile stare that sharpens with the lightest flick of his whim, like a camera lens focusing, like catching the photograph of a lifetime. He’s all knees and elbows, knobby and gawky, but soft, too, with a warmth to his fingertips and a softness to his cheeks that clings to his bones like it’s overjoyed, rejoicing to  _ be. _ He sits on a wrought iron fire escape in the early hours of the morning and glares at the sky, implores it to free some of the stars, to wink at him, sly and clever and coy as always. He refuses to use his locker at school, preferring to carry all his books at once, enjoying the thud of them against his spine. He cuffs his jeans, his sweater sleeves, and he still firmly believes in the prospect of a hotel on the moon. 

He’s smudged fingerprints on dirty glass. He’s a hum in the night. He’s paint dripped messy onto hardwood floorboards and jelly staining his cheek after a deep bite of toast in the morning and the ring around the inside of a mug after forgetting his coffee for a day or two. He’s dried flowers and the slight, faded stains they leave behind on the pages he presses them between. 

He has a best friend who gives him a granola bar at lunch every single day without fail and waits until he finishes to start eating himself, who embraces him like a brother, the type of deep,  _ right _ embrace that he could sink into like wet sand at the edge of the ocean. He has a sister and a mother somewhere, waiting for him the way he waits for them, cheering him on over FaceTime and WhatsApp, in his corner even after he left theirs. He has someone who watches him with soft eyes, with machine grease painted on his skin, who drops scruffy kisses on his forehead, on his chin when he comes to make sure Harley’s tucked into bed. He has a crazy scary ginger dryad who would edit his AP Lit papers or stab someone through the throat with a ballpoint pen with equal gusto. He has a great big, messy fucking family and it’s  _ terrifying _ and  _ everything he has ever wanted. _

He grins a grin that aches his jaw with its wide spread, that punches out dimples in his cheeks. He lives through nights he wakes up shaking over shadows only he sees. He goes a day without eating, but gets collected by Tony and gently reminded, a box of Cheerios shook in his direction, a glass of orange juice left on his nightstand. He busks, singing echoing Hozier and The Beatles and Daniel Caesar in Grand Central, and he sings himself hoarse on a stage wearing a cardigan and a squeaky exaggeration of Peter’s accent as a full theater applauds back at him. He paints out on the balcony and doesn’t need Tony to watch him, to keep him safe, but Tony comes anyway and works on his tablet, peers at him over the rim of his reading glasses and smiles slightly, and Harley feels his gaze like that of the sun upon his back, mellow through his t-shirt, and feels like things have started to fall into place for him. 

Still so desperately strange. But good, too. 

—

_ coulda called me _

the first thunderstorm i remember was the loudest thing i’d heard until

i put the disc of my baby ballerina instruction video into the dvd player and slipped on a pair of black ballet shoes and put my hands on the pink and purple plastic barre

when my mamma and my daddy started throwing photo frames onto the tile floor and i listened

to the shards hit. 

it echoed behind me while i mirrored 

the woman

deep breath, arms aloft, bent knees

and, now, third position. 

(the loudest part was the sound of the vacuum after, sucking up stuttered breaths of glass dust, the crinkle under my slippers when i stepped on a piece of what was left. i still wonder if i shouldn’t have tried to glue it back together the same way i used to glue everything: with a tube of orange glitter glue.)

mamma tells me i never shut up as a baby. i’d stand on legs with rolls and grip the wooden bars of my crib with dimpled hands and prattle nonsense like the water through the engine of my daddy’s old motorboat, the one he had to sell. he is a hoarder, with a basement full of boxes and shoes and papers and skis that won’t touch the face of a mountain again, but he never holds onto the things he loves. 

i have not yet hiked to the end of the trail

of compliments that float back years later and ache. 

_ she’s so quiet, she’s so good! _

they coulda called me zipper lips. 

i was dependable, i fit just right, i couldn’t pop open if i tried

like a well-worn hoodie or the grey parka my sister has worn 

after me

after mamma

before my brother will. 

_ i am just so good,  _ i still say, cracking a fist down onto my own arm, onto the muscle of my thigh 

when i do something daddy would’ve hit me twice for.

i figure if 

he doesn’t punish me then 

who else will? 

who’s gonna keep me acting so quiet, so good?

(me, i will. a mottling of bruises like a gauguin, i want to be beautiful, there is the pattern of my knuckles, and just here is a burn that ate four fingers across my right hand, and here, here is a knick in my shin from when i slammed it in the door. i’m so good, daddy. i’m the best thing you ever did.)

when i was twelve mamma told me i was too old to cry and 

i don’t let another tear slip out until i’m sixteen and

i’ve got striped arms and hipbones like battering rams.

even then, it’s in the dark of my bedroom

when only the pillow hears it

dries my tears with cotton fingers and the hush of my hair again the fabric. 

once or twice my sister crawled her way in with me and wrapped herself

around my back, like i was climbing everest alone but she

was my survival pack

and she said  _ shush _ through eleven year old lips and i knew

that we would never, ever make this right. 

(i say that bed is the womb from which i clawed free, there is rebirth in the cocoon of sweat-stained sheets that are printed with  _ peace _ in a hundred different fonts, a hundred different colors. i blinked newborn eyes and saw the world for the first time, blinded by brilliance and gritty perception.) 

at sixteen i said  _ no _ and he said  _ please?  _ and i said  _ no _ but we did it anyway. i wished, i wished, i wished to be a better zipper. i learned, then, that even good, even the best is flawed. 

i was seventeen with a finger down my throat and a red mark on my cheek from the toilet rim, that was

when i grabbed the fabric of the jacket i was still holding shut in two fists and tore it apart like clark kent. 

that’s when i opened up and let it all fly. 

secrets (just glass shards crumbled underfoot)

screaming themselves from

the sour part of my stomach. 

a blizzard came huffing out. 

ripped tissue paper and mounds of salt and ash that had built themselves into a cavern, a walled, empty thing in the pit of my stomach

loosed from my lips, set in the type of smile a sovereign wears when she lifts the bloodstained crown from the head, from the  _ head _ of the king’s corpse. 

(i wept. i wept. i fashioned myself into judas and asked for absolution from a pair of prophets that would sooner smack a belt against my back than dry a tear off my cheek. this was atonement. i bled sins into the bathtub and swallowed a handful of white pills and imagined each one was inscribed, said  _ blessed _ on the front. i woke up on the tile not two hours later and went to school in the morning.) 

but now

now, i’m two cabinet doors with bronze handles. 

when you wrap your fingers around them they are cold. 

when you trace the flowering design it feels contrived, scribbled, the kind of thing printed out in a factory. don’t bother to handle with care. they weren’t hand-carved. 

when you wrench me open i am

dust-coated to the crease of every corner

with a maroonish stain in the center of the wood like the shadow of something that had once been alive with a bounding, beating heart but now is

harvested. could be served on a platter. 

do you, do you still wonder why there’s nothing left? 

all i think is 

_ they really should’ve  _

_ called me zipper lips. _

**Author's Note:**

> warnings!!  
> mentions of domestic abuse but no description of an event  
> depressive thoughts  
> thoughts re: disordered eating  
> vague descriptions of a panic attack  
> mentions of puking (entirely unrelated to the eating disorder)  
> an extremely matter of fact, distant statement that one character had attempted suicide at one point
> 
> this sounds darker than it really is, i think; most of this content is described very distantly. the main thing i would be careful with is if reading a character who is generally anxious and down on themselves will hurt you mentally. please be careful.
> 
> i wrote this as a form of venting. everything in this piece is something i have in some way dealt with - not always identically to harley, but everything is borne of a personal experience here, from a parent tripping me into a corner and me needing stitches on my head to harley's thought processes - and i wrote this knowing that every experience is different. this isn't supposed to be accurate to every experience; just imaginary harley's (and loosely mine, i guess).
> 
> if you have any feedback or anything to say re: this piece or anything at all, please comment. if you want more harley stuff let me know. i love u all deeply.


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